Tucson Agenda brings another news source to the Old Pueblo
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If you're looking for news about what's happening in Tucson, there's a new source of news in the Old Pueblo.
What's happening: The Tucson Agenda, a sister publication of the Arizona Agenda, launches on Tuesday — Independence Day.
- Curt Prendergast and Caitlin Schmidt, formerly of the Arizona Daily Star, will constitute the newsroom.
- The Arizona Agenda was started in 2021 by local journalists Rachel Leingang and Hank Stephenson on Substack, an email newsletter platform.
Why it matters: Local news sources are dwindling, and Tucson has been hit particularly hard by this trend, Stephenson told Axios Phoenix.
- The Daily Star has repeatedly contracted, most recently in April when the paper laid off nearly a quarter of its staff.
- "Local news, especially in Tucson, is in a crisis right now, and we think we can help fill in some of those gaps," Stephenson said.
- Tucson is a great town for a publication like the Agenda not only because of the recent Daily Star layoffs, he said, but because it's a very civically engaged city.
What they're saying: "There just aren't enough reporters in southern Arizona to cover everything that's going on anymore," Schmidt said, adding the Daily Star's coverage decisions are often made at the corporate level rather than locally.
Details: As with the Arizona Agenda, people can pay for a subscription that sends a newsletter to your email inbox every morning, but they don't have to pay if they don't want to.
- The asking price for a subscription is $120 a year.
- Schmidt said last Thursday they already have nearly 1,000 subscribers, about 221 of whom are paid.
Jeremy and Jessica's thought bubble: We've been proud Arizona Agenda subscribers since it launched, and we're equally proud to subscribe to the Tucson Agenda as well.
- Prendergast and Schmidt are two of the best in the business, and we know Tucson readers will be served as well by them as we have over the past two years by our former colleagues Leingang and Stephenson.