Insight Arizona Podcast: BlogForArizona Grassroots Media’s Newest Project

Howdy readers! I would love you to become listeners and watchers, too! Because the BlogForArizona Grassroots Media Network is launching a podcast!

Currently, our Insight Arizona YouTube channel is the hub of our operations; please visit us, like and subscribe! We plan to have a Newsletter (probably at Beehiv) and audio-only podcast syndication (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.), so you can subscribe via your favorite podcasting app or email.

My friend and colleague, Andrew Sheesley, and I came to a similar conclusion late last year: what the world really needed was another goddamned podcast featuring opinionated white dudes! But seriously, we didn’t see independent and grassroots media putting out any podcasts focused on Arizona’s politics. There are a few shows and podcasts coming from traditional journalistic sources (and those are mainly interviews with newmakers, and less focused on policy), but really no podcasts out there with a decicidedly liberal viewpoint and partisan lense, being made by and for the grassroots of democratic politics.

I already do something in that vein as the Program Director for TheDGT.org with TheDGT’s Monday Shows featuring candidates and office-holders. We feel no need to offer more of the same at Insight Arizona. Full disclosure: Andrews is also a Board Member and the Treasurer at TheDGT.

We decided to root our efforts in substantive policy discussions that explain how public policy intersects with people’s daily lives. We’ll do our best to get at least one such policy-centric episode out per month; these take a lot of research, interviews, and synthesis to do! But that is not everyone’s cup of tea, so we have lots of other ideas for interesting shows, and we’d love to have your ideas about what you want to see, too! In between those anchor policy episodes (our first one will be on the policy around our unhoused population) we aim to do a bunch of other ‘fun’ (for policy/politics geeks like us…) stuff.

We will likely do an occassional interview-style episode, where we speak to one or more people about politics and campaigns (such as the panel discussion we did recently with AZ Democratic Party Chair Fernandez and some of our Party’s younger leaders to discuss younger voter engagement). But that will be limited and mostly done as part of our work at TheDGT.

We are also playing with the idea of Mystery-Science-Theater-3000-style episodes in which Andrew and I will watch video of local government meetings (like this one, where we watched a recent Pima Co. BoS meeting on ICE-related policies), press conferences, TV news events (working on a two-parter covering a discussion about the pros and cons of the RTA Next proposal, dropping soon) and similar VODs, and we’ll discuss the deeper issues and personalities we see – and that mentally normal folks would probably miss – and we (mostly me!) can get pretty snarky and NSFW!

BlogForArizona has never tried – nor pretended – to be neutral, or to give the perspective of ‘both sides’. When one side is a gang of anti-democratic radicals who want an authoritarian/fascist government (and the absolute cowards who refuse to confront their radicalism), why do we need to hear their lies and disinformation? What the fascists deserve is mocking distain and derision, not amplification.

Insight Arizona, unsurprisingly, shares that perspective.

This is early days for Andrew and me at Insight Arizona, so we don’t have many episodes in the can, as yet. We are still building the plane as we fly it in terms of production value and methods, editing, branding, episode content, distribution channels, etc. And we are always open to our BlogForArizona readers’ suggestions about topics, interviewees, formats, and all of your creative energy and curiouslty! Of course, we are grassroots (i.e. perpetually broke!), so if you have related skills and talents, and would like to lend a hand (or a couple bucks!), we’d also love to hear from you; please contact me directly, or leave a comment!