Illustration by Eric-John Torres
Audio By Carbonatix
If you’re reading this, we at Phoenix New Times know you’re probably already a fan (and, believe me, the feeling is mutual). But unless you’re checking our homepage a few times each day or frantically refreshing your social feeds for our posts like some kind of local internet hero, you’re probably missing some of our best reads.
While we have a few newsletters for you to subscribe to, we don’t have a dedicated newsletter for our news coverage. Until now.
To help you stay informed, we’re launching just that — a weekly newsletter to keep you updated on the news, produced by our reporters and editors. We hope that you subscribe. It’s free and it’s going to rock.
GET PHOENIX’S FIERCEST LOCAL NEWS
You’ve known New Times since the early ’70s as a relentlessly aggressive news outlet. During that time, the paper at turns has employed just about every sort of news reporter readers could want in their corner: feared muckrakers, unapologetic wiseasses, dogged investigators, deadline poets. In their own way, they’re all working toward the same goal. They’re trying to make Phoenix a better, more interesting place to live.
Over the years, those reporters collectively helped to steer the course of an emerging American megalopolis. (Phoenix was the 20th-largest city in the country in 1970; today, Phoenix is fifth. We did our part.) New Times reporters have won just about every print journalism award of note in Arizona and the country. They’ve rankled advertisers, chagrined their editors — and made every story count for you, the reader, even as the internet pushed us to expand from print into pixels.
These days our print paper holds just a handful of the news stories we publish. In a typical week we publish about 60 stories online, a quarter of those in our news section. Readers lucky enough to pick up a physical copy in the Valley still get our signature mix of news, culture, music and restaurant coverage. This newsletter is meant to collect our finest work for readers who want to keep up with breaking stories in the Valley, or just enjoy a great yarn.
A newsletter curated by our news editor
Starting in November (once we hit our subscriber goal of 500), each Thursday, New Times news editor Zach Buchanan will select his favorites from among our freshest stories for you to read.
Sometimes these stories will be bangers, the stories that tens of thousands of people read. Examples of late could include such hits as: our scoop on the Q-Anon shaman’s $40 trillion (sic) lawsuit against the Trump administration, or our scoop that a student at Arizona State University is suing fraternity members she alleges filmed her during sex and disseminated the video as part of an organized hazing rite for frat pledges.
Other times, we’ll be surfacing stories for you that we simply loved and don’t want you to miss. We might include Stephen Lemons on the crime beat, revealing to a bereaved family that the man who allegedly got away with killing their son may now be in prison for a separate murder. Or we might bring you inside the service at a Valley megachurch, the Sunday after Charlie Kirk’s death, that presented parishioners with an AI-rendered manifestation of Kirk and promised his opponents: “You’ve just unleashed the dragon!”
In every case, we’ll be sending you our superlatives. And, as I know I keep mentioning, because it’s frankly astonishing after 55 years: It’s all still free. Free to subscribe, free from paywalls. While you can become a member to support the work we are doing and get cool perks, this is our service to you in the Valley. We’re glad the appreciation is mutual.
