A new media outlet named the “Arizona Agenda” is focusing on in-depth reporting

The Arizona Agenda is a new media outlet that covers in-depth reporting and public policy issues. Veteran Arizona reporters Rachel Leingang and Hank Stephenson teamed up to create the Arizona Agenda. Earlier they told us about their new project.

Arizona Agenda is a newsletter on the tech platform “Substack” where one can receive a roundup of the daily news in politics that’s delivered into a person’s inbox.

Every week, Arizona Agenda will choose a topic to center around where “we try to fill a hole that we don’t see in other local politic reporting,” Leingang said.

This all started when Leingang reached out to Stephenson and asked him if he “wanted to apply for this grant to start our own newsletter and I said ‘sure’ and figured we would never take it beyond that. But, we were among a dozen people in the world who were selected to kind of get some seed money to get this thing together,” Stephenson said.

He continued that him and Leingang have been friends for a long time, worked together in the past, and get along really well and he “thought this was a good opportunity to try something different outside of the regular confines of corporate journalism.”

Leingang mentioned that they didn’t think they would get this grant and be able to start this. She always wondered “what would it be like if we didn’t have bosses, wouldn’t that be exciting and crazy and now we get to try that out.”

She continued that, “it’s a totally different sort of format, we get to have more of a voice than we would in more traditional media and we kind of just get to see if we can sink or swim on our own…it’s a huge challenge and terrifying on a lot of levels but really fun at the same time.”