It’s my last day leading New Times’ news coverage. I’ll miss this place

Editor’s note: We’re going to miss Zach tremendously. We’re also actively seeking his replacement — if you think you’d be a fit, please apply pronto.

When I first walked into the Phoenix New Times building in April 2024 for my first day as news editor, I hoped I would be up for the challenge. I also thought there was a non-zero chance that I’d quickly be exposed as a fraud.

I’d spent the previous 15 years as a sports writer, much of them in Arizona, and I trusted my journalistic work ethic and instincts. I’d paid attention to the issues in this city, as any engaged citizen would, but I hadn’t had to direct coverage of them. I knew what I wanted the end product to look like — I wanted our coverage to have verve and searing purpose, stripped of the artifice too often found in news stories — but knowing the destination doesn’t always reveal the path one takes to get there. I’d have to figure that out.

In the first few months especially, it felt like trying to capture all the grains of sand during a haboob, but I quickly gained a literacy in our myriad local issues — our politics and policing, our water and extreme heat crises, and how they all intersect. I also gained the confidence that I belonged in the job. In my two-plus years at the paper, I’d like to think our news coverage has been incisive and funny and urgent and vital. Our reporters have called out bullshit, broken news and made complicated subjects more digestible. And always, I hope, we did it in a compulsively readable style befitting the storied alt-weekly whose legacy we were entrusted with carrying.

Today, my time leading the New Times news section ends. I’m not going far — I’ll still be in news, and still in the Valley — but no longer will I get the pleasure of seeing my name on this paper’s masthead. I don’t think it’s yet hit me how much I’m going to miss it. To have played a small role in New Times’ more than half-century of history has been an incredible privilege that I never took for granted. The people who work at New Times, especially those in our small-but-mighty editorial department, really care about it. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced such a feeling of workplace camaraderie.

Every single day, New Times’ journalists show up and bust their asses to provide the best possible coverage of the Valley. They never had the most resources or enough hours in the day, and yet the work they produced always felt robust and essential. I’ve lived here for more than a decade, but I leave New Times far more informed about our community than I was going in. I know more about our politics and government because it was my job to learn it. I also am much more plugged in on the best and most interesting restaurants in town and on the many cultural quirks that make this place special. That’s all thanks to my colleagues here.

I hope you’ve found our work valuable. I’m proud of the revealing reporting we produced through our Arizona Watchdog Project — you cannot imagine the number of hours that went into editing those pieces — and of our work covering policing, homelessness, elections, immigration and so many other subjects. We have only two full-time news reporters, but they do the work of twice that number. I sometimes felt like I needed therapy when one of them went on vacation.

I also enjoyed the rare times I got to be a reporter instead of an editor. I loved digging into the bitter feud that has bubbled behind the facade of one of the Valley’s most recognizable faces, personal injury attorney mogul Brandon Rafi. As a child of two attorneys and the brother of another, I particularly reveled in unraveling the ongoing legal controversy over a $12.8 million-winning lottery ticket. I also liked doing incredibly frivolous stuff like ranking the best rejected personalized Arizona license plates. Most outlets no longer prioritize storytelling that quirky, irreverent or, frankly, gloriously stupid. This one does.

I hope it remains that way, and it’ll need all of our support to do so. I’ll still be reading New Times, and I’ll be supporting it as a member. I’ve seen firsthand what our news reporters, Clarissa Sosin and Morgan Fischer, can do when given the time and the tools. I’ve seen how food editor Tirion Boan and food reporter Sara Crocker make it seem like they’re everywhere in the restaurant scene at once, and how editor Jen Goldberg and reporter Ben Leatherman keep the music and culture sections hyper-relevant and connected. I’ve personally benefited from how social media editor Itzia Crespo and art director Eric Torres make our stuff — and sometimes us — look as good as possible. And I’ve particularly appreciated the guidance of our erstwhile editor-in-chief Sam Eifling, who now serves this and the other three Voice Media Group newsrooms as national editor. What I’ll miss most is the time we all got to spend together, making each other laugh.

So this is it. It’s hard to believe it’s over, but it is. This place is really special. I hope you’ll keep supporting the people who make it that way.