Why we left Substack

It wasn’t just the Nazis…

Hey readers!

Hopefully you’ve noticed that we moved off of Substack a few weeks ago.

But we wanted to send you one final note from our now-former regrettable platform (TM), as an explanation and a little housekeeping.

And to get people to stop subscribing here.

First, the housekeeping.

If you haven’t been getting the Arizona Agenda (or our sister publications) since the move, please check your Spam or Promotions folders.
Editions are probably piling up there. 
Nothing’s wrong with your subscription — inboxes just get weird during moves.

Gmail: Drag us into Primary → click “Yes”
Apple Mail: Junk → Move to Inbox
Outlook: Junk → Not Junk → Add to Safe Senders

Best move: Add our new sending address to your contacts. It's arizonaagenda@mail.beehiiv.com

And if you have any problems, please reach out to info@arizonaagenda.com

If you’re reading this and finding the Agenda for the first time, please subscribe at our new home: ArizonaAgenda.com

Once a week for the foreseeable future, we’ll keep manually migrating anyone who doesn’t get the message. But that's a pain, so please just click the link or one of these buttons. 

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We’ve had many people ask why we moved. And we have many reasons.

A big one is that Substack is a percentage-based system, meaning the more we grow, the more money Substack takes as its cut. Substack charges 10% of our subscription revenue to use its platform, and that starts to sting when you realize that that could pay for half of a reporter.¹

But more than that, Substack has changed since we first joined in 2021.

And the direction it’s heading — more algorithm, more social media — just doesn’t mesh with the direction we’re heading. If Substack had put half as much effort into improving its email system as it did into trying to compete with Twitter, we might not have moved.

And, of course, there’s the Nazi issue.

Being associated with a platform that hosts literal Nazi publications goes against our core values. But honestly, this isn’t just a Substack problem. Fascism is an American problem that goes much deeper than a handful of publications or a single platform. These bastards are everywhere these days.

And in theory, we support Substack’s hands-off approach to content moderation.

We don’t want to hear from some corporate schmuck that the Agenda violates their terms of agreement, just as we don’t want to hear from some government goon that the Agenda is fake news and therefore must be silenced.

That said, when Substack’s algorithm started promoting Nazi publications, that was a breaking point for us. And Substack’s corporate leadership’s response to the justifiable outrage was, to put it mildly, very disappointing.

But we don’t hate Substack.

We credit the company for having the vision to build what they’ve built and change the entire media landscape. Without Substack, we’d still be working for terrible corporations that own most of our news ecosystem (yeah, we’re looking at you, Gannett). Or maybe we’d be flipping burgers.

When Substack was young, and the Arizona Agenda was just an idea, Substack took a chance on us and offered an advance to launch this odd little publication. They had no guarantee that they’d ever recoup their investment.

But the Agenda family of newsletters has been a success — and that success allowed us to expand and launch the Tucson Agenda in 2023, after the daily paper in Tucson laid off about a quarter of its staff.

Besides our two flagship newsletters, we’ve also parlayed your support into launching three weekly publications focusing on some of the most important issues facing Arizona: education, artificial intelligence and water. (Subscribe!)

Our relationship with Substack has always been a business arrangement. And at the end of the day, we made a business decision that Substack is no longer the right home for us.

So we moved!

Recently, we were talking to a local news reporter who was thinking of going independent and had noticed our move away from Substack. They asked if we thought it was a bad idea to launch their publication on Substack.

On the contrary. Substack is still a great turnkey operation, and many of its tools help budding publications grow. And it’s mostly idiot proof.

But as the Agenda continues to grow, idiot-proof is no longer an overriding goal.

We want flexibility, customizability and the ability to do more. We want to grow and evolve.

But with that change comes a new learning curve, new growing pains, and a whole lot of toggles that we’re still figuring out.

So please bear with us!

The first few weeks felt like we were going back to the beginning, when every day was a struggle to put out the newsletter.

The difference is, these days, we have an amazing team to help.

Thanks to your support, we’ve grown this scrappy journalism operation from two reporters who don’t know if their paychecks would bounce to a core team of five journalists who are vaguely confident that their checks should clear. Not to mention a cast of steady freelancers, interns, and contractors who also get paid!

So…

We’d like to end our 1,104th (and final) post on Substack the same way we ended our first post: with a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has made the Agenda possible.

Thank you!

Now go subscribe at our new home.

1. We literally hired a new reporter with the money we saved from moving. Unlike the corporate papers, every dollar the Agenda makes goes straight back into building a better news outlet.