The unvarnished truth, daily: Newsletter, videocast expand Republic's election coverage
Arizona voters are two-for-the-last-two presidential picks, a run that has fired up political bases and sped up defections to the middle. Today, nonaffiliated independents are nearly as large a voter registration bloc as Republicans.
In the coming months, Arizonans will have to navigate quasi-closed primaries, retooled vote deadlines and a flood of special interests looking to further their causes around new dark money restrictions.
To make sense of it all, we’ve recruited and deployed the largest political reporting team in Arizona, with veteran statehouse and national desks and a strong network of reporters covering local politics in Maricopa County and northern and southern Arizona.
Election 2024 will be fiercely contested, and The Arizona Republic is deeply invested in fact-based, clear-eyed and expert reporting. Our political coverage, already extensive, is expanding this month with the addition of a videocast and a newsletter.
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On Presidents Day, we’ll debut The Recount, a weekly newsletter reported, written and curated by elections reporter Sasha Hupka. With feeds from around the newsroom and state, The Recount will be your best source for political scoops, campaign updates and insider exclusives. It’ll be an “oasis of clarity” in the desert of talking heads and spinmeisters.
A week later, we’ll premiere The Briefing, a broadcast-style weekly news show. Reported and edited for YouTube, Instagram and azcentral.com, The Briefing will inhabit a digital space increasingly preferred by news consumers ― video on demand.
Azcentral is the state’s most viewed news website and the perfect venue to ensure every voter in Arizona has access to The Briefing. We’re recording the first episodes right now in The Republic’s downtown Phoenix studio, with host Rafael Carranza, producer Itzel Rios Soto and video director Diana Payan.
Plan for The Briefing to be your guided tour of the week’s top news, a moving picture complement to our widely read newsletter, AZ Briefing, sent daily to nearly 200,000 people. The videocast will feature exclusive interviews and take you behind the scenes with reporters working on the most important stories of the year.
The Briefing is another “oasis of clarity” amid the din of national reporters parachuting in to cover the 2024 election. With The Briefing, The Recount, The Gaggle podcast, azcentral.com and The Republic in print, comprehensive political coverage is a click or a play or a page away at a moment’s notice.
We’ll engage with you on every platform as Arizona attempts to pick three presidents in a row.
Arizona voters did it before by picking George W. Bush twice in the 2000s and, before that, Bill Clinton in 1996. They did it with George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 and 1980. And before giving the nod to Richard Nixon over winner John F. Kennedy in 1960, Arizona voters were 12-for-12 after statehood ― from Woodrow Wilson to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Why are we calling this expansion of political coverage an “oasis of clarity”?
The phrase came to us before the 2020 election when former Arizona Republic and USA TODAY top editor Nicole Carroll used it to explain USA TODAY’s coverage ― reliable and trustworthy. Republic News Director Kathy Tulumello made those values her team’s clarion call.
In journalistic coinage, it goes back at least to 2007. In a column for The Guardian, writer and satirist Charlie Brooker called “bite-sized primers” produced by BBC News an “oasis of clarity” amid the chaos of major breaking news.
In 2019, Salon culture writer Melanie McFarland called anchor Chris Wallace an “oasis of clarity” next to a stable of partisan commentators at Fox News practicing “spin, prevarication and ‘whataboutism.’”
For readers of The Republic, it’s our promise to go deeper than anyone else. To provide a complete and compelling news report. To publish the unvarnished truth, every day.
It’s our commitment to tell it like it is.
Greg Burton is executive editor of The Arizona Republic and a regional editor for USA TODAY in the West.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The Recount, The Briefing expand Republic's election coverage
