The year is almost over. The Agenda is still alive.
Here's our latest business update.
Now that the election is finally over, we’re taking some time to recharge and regroup before we start covering our second legislative session as a tiny local journalism outlet.
We’ll be out of your inboxes and only partially working until Monday, January 2.
Before we go, though, we wanted to provide you with an end-of-year business update, so you can see what your readership and hard-earned dollars support.
After our last business update, we held a birthday party at Crescent Ballroom1, where we finally got to meet some of you in person! That was a delight — putting faces to names, hearing your stories, getting good ideas.
If you’re new here, and you want to get to know the two people who run the newsletter (Rachel Leingang and Hank Stephenson), check out our About page to learn more about us and the vision behind the newsletter.
We truly can’t say it enough: Thank you all so much for being here, supporting us and caring about our shared home, Arizona. You have shown, via your readership, that you give a damn about this place. That’s worth celebrating.
We also need your support so we can continue writing the Agenda. Pay for a subscription, buy some merch, share our newsletters with new people, talk about us at your local wine shop, get your whole office signed up.
Local news faces grim odds. Each day brings more headlines of our colleagues in corporate-owned media getting bought out, furloughed and laid off. We’re trying a new model to avoid the calamity those corporations provide, and we answer only to you, our readers — not to corporate overlords, sponsors, advertisers or political parties.
We love what we do: writing daily about how Arizona government works, who controls the levels of power and how that impacts your life. Please don’t make us go back to corporate newspapers (as if they’re hiring), or worse, public relations. Subscribe now to keep two experienced, independent journalists in the game, working for you.
We also want to hear more about you and your thoughts on the Agenda. So we put together this quick reader survey. Your insights will help us understand our audience (right now, we only know your email addresses) and make decisions on what kinds of stories we should prioritize next year.
You can fill out the survey by clicking this link. Your responses are anonymous.
The financial picture
Since the beginning, we’ve been radically transparent about how much money this newsletter earns, offering regular updates through the highs and lows. And we’re happy to report that this quarter was mostly highs.
At our one-year anniversary in August, we had about 4,500 total subscribers. That number has since increased to nearly 6,000. The election, and Arizona’s typical place in the center of the muck, played a role in helping fuel a good quarter of free subscriber growth.
Of our nearly 6,000 overall subscribers, about 1,440 are on some kind of paid plan. We now offer several paid options, including monthly and annual plans, gift subscriptions, plus group subscriptions for your office or civic organization. (And, as a reminder, if you truly can’t afford a subscription, you only have to ask — we’ll comp you for a year.)
Our gross annualized revenue is now more than $120,000, which is more than we received from Substack in our year of funding to launch the publication. Perhaps most important to us psychologically, it replaces the salaries we collectively made at our previous corporate news gigs (although that’s not including benefits or accounting for expenses). It’s been a lot of hard work, but thanks to your support, we’re getting close to making an actual, sustainable living from this small business that we’ve built from the ground up. How cool is that?
Around 25% of our subscribers pay, a very high number for Substack, which considers a paid rate of 5-10% to be excellent. This indicates that our readers are very dedicated and that our overall readership has lots of room to grow.
Our price increase to $120 annually seems to have some sticker-shock for new readers, so we’ve run more frequent sales to compensate for that. We think the price is fair, and that it reflects our long hours and years of expertise, but we understand there are a lot of demands on your wallet these days.
We were worried we’d lose a lot of paid subscribers as annual subscriptions started to renew in August, but we’ve done a good job both retaining and growing our paid subscriber list, so we haven’t seen a nosedive of any kind there. Thanks for sticking around!
Since August, we also enlisted help from BC Creative, a super organized crew who have helped us remind people to update credit cards, get our subscription numbers in order on the backend and come up with outreach plans for selling group subscriptions. They’re fantastic, and if your small business needs someone to help manage, organize and kick it into shape, we highly suggest you look them up.
A good chunk of our recent growth is coming from Substack’s recommendations feature, which allows other newsletters to recommend us to their audiences. Thanks to all the ‘sletters that recommend us! It helps a ton. And we also get good growth when our newsletters are shared by readers. You’re more likely to sign up if a friend sends you an email or link and says you gotta read it.
The newsletter and its success have also brought us great freelance opportunities, which have helped us pay our bills and get bylines in national and international publications we’re proud to work with.
The content you like
It’s safe to say that our Daily Agenda is a must-read. Its open rate is almost always more than 50%, which is really solid for a daily email. We consider the dailies our bread and butter, and we’ll keep tinkering with various sections to keep it fresh.
While those Daily Agendas reach a consistent audience, our Friday original work often extends beyond our subscribers. During the election, we created a set of cheat sheets that were shared a bunch and helped bring in new readers. We heard from lots of you that they were a great tool when filling out your ballots, which is super cool. They also helped us fill out our ballots!
We nabbed our first awards recently as well. The Phoenix New Times named us “best newsletter,” praising our ability to “cut through to the key stories of the day, and keep a close eye on the constant antics down at the state house.”
“Local news in the state is better for it,” the New Times wrote of the Agenda.
The Arizona Press Club gave us some major props as well. Rachel won the big prize, the Virg Hill Arizona Journalist of the Year Award, for her work at the Republic in early 2021 and at the Agenda for the rest of that year. Several of our stories took home prizes as well: Hank’s profile of a former election conspiracist took first in community personality profile, and Rachel’s story on neglected state technology took first in community state/federal government reporting. Hank’s political mapping story took third in community political reporting, while his school board story took third in community education reporting.
These wins mean we can now call ourselves an “award-winning local newsletter.”
What’s coming next
Unfortunately, we’ve repeatedly told all of you that we intend to put a paywall, so now we have to do that. Like we’ve said, we don’t really want to, but we don’t have another way to get all the fence-sitters off said fence and into the habit of paying for news.
We’ll be experimenting with the paywall’s placement, free editions and other ways to entice paid subscriptions over the coming months, so bear with us. We never know what will work until we try something and it either succeeds or fails miserably.
We may opt, eventually, to lose the paywall if we think it’s hindering our growth. As those of you who’ve been around since the beginning know, we’re constantly trying to figure out how to best serve readers while also making a living.
As you can imagine, since we last talked business in August, we’ve mostly been dedicating our time to writing about the election. The Daily Agendas, in particular, seemed to give readers a way to manage the onslaught of election news without having to sit online all day, scrolling through your preferred digital hellscape.
But we’re ready to move on from the election. It’s going to be a wild time in Arizona’s split government, and we’re excited for a non-election year where we can write more stories about policy and what politicians are doing, rather than saying.
Hank plans to camp out at the Legislature for the session to harass our lawmakers and bring you the weirdest, freshest scoops from the Capitol. Rachel plans to cover how government works, which involves not being at the Capitol, where government mostly does not work.
Thanks for letting us take a break to recharge before the legislative session. We’ll be back in 2023, in your inboxes every weekday at 6 a.m., keeping you informed about the people who are supposed to work for you.
Shoutout to Crescent Ballroom owner Charlie Levy, who let us use the space.
So you're taking a break just when Sinema decides she's not getting enough attention? Coincidence? I think not!
And when I turn off my ringer, that's when the calls come! You take a much-deserved break, and Sinema leaves the Democratic Party! I guess she was tired of not being the center of attention this season.