The Show for Aug. 24, 2026: Funding for free school lunches, skin cancer vaccine and more

Arizona has cut hundreds of thousands of people from food assistance following the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. Now hundreds of Arizona schools could lose funding for free lunches. Plus, how a vaccine developed in Arizona may provide a new form of treatment for melanoma.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production The Show is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, a new vaccine being developed in Arizona is showing promise in treating a form of cancer.

LAUREN GILGER: And the cascading impact of SNAP cuts on schools’ free lunch programs.

MARK BRODIE: But first, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes says there is no evidence of a quid pro quo between Gov. Katie Hobbs and a company that provides beds to children in foster care. The investigation looked into whether donations Sunshine Residential made to the governor’s inaugural fund led to an increase in the amount the state pays the company for its services. Mayes and her office concluded it did not and, therefore, will not bring any charges against the governor. With me now to talk about what the investigation did find and what might come next is Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services. Good morning, Howie.

HOWIE FISCHER: Good morning. Yes, wasn’t exactly a surprise, but let’s talk about that.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, so what did this investigation find? Because as our listeners will remember, this company did get an increase per bed from the Department of Child Safety after it had made some donations.

HOWIE FISCHER: Well, let’s start off and talk about the size of the increase, because it’s not so much the increase. Sunshine Residential is probably the largest provider of beds for foster care children. More to the point, they can do some things that other foster homes can’t. They can take a brother and sister, they have a large capacity, and apparently Sunshine has been very willing to work with Department of Child Safety to find beds when needed. This started out in 2023 with the company getting $140 per bed per night. The company said, look, we need more money. If you want us to provide the beds, fine. And then they came back and said, well, wait, the feds are paying us $225, and they need the beds, for example, for children who are picked up by Homeland Security, so it came back to $234. So you’ve had basically a 60% increase over a couple of years. What also occurred is, A, as you point out, the $100,000 donation to the governor’s inaugural fund. Now, remember, this inaugural fund was supposed to pay for the party, if you will. The party only cost $200,000; they collected like $1.9 million, and the rest of it got to be used for politics, which is part of the reason it’s suspect. There’s also another $300,000 that was given to the Arizona Democratic Party, which then can turn around and use it to help Katie Hobbs get elected. And what we also subsequently found out from the investigation is that they gave yet another $150,000 to the governor’s legal defense fund, which is to help her go ahead and battle Kari Lake and that particular litigation. So there’s a lot of money involved, but again, proving a connection is difficult because the people who work for DCS say, we were aware of the fact that they’d given some money, but we never told the governor. The governor said, at least through her attorneys, she didn’t know. But again, remember, she never actually sat down for an interview, take that for what it’s worth.

MARK BRODIE: Right. Well, how significant is that to the investigation? Did the final report say anything about the fact that the governor and her office provided written statements, but never actually answered questions?

HOWIE FISCHER: They only mentioned it sort of in passing because it was fairly obvious by that time. I mean, probably every press conference we had with the governor for the past year, year and a half is, "So, when are you going to sit down?" "We’re in negotiations, in talks with the attorney general’s office." Which, as we found out this past week, even as she told us that, was a lie because they already knew they were only going to provide written response. Actually, they provided two written responses: one from her office, paid for by taxpayers, and another from her campaign side, paid for by, ta-da, a legal defense fund. Which gets into a whole another question in here is: Where is all this legal defense fund money coming from? It’s one of those loopholes in the law. I can find out, for example, what companies have contributed to her, to the Democratic Party, to a special Katie Hobbs fund that can take larger contributions. But because the fact the way the law is worded, there could be $1 million coming in, maybe more, into the legal defense fund that the governor keeps with her law firm, Coppersmith Brockelman, and we have no idea where that comes from. So, many things unanswered in this, other than the fact that we know that the attorney general won’t prosecute. Now, also remember, the auditor general, with the help of Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, is conducting its own probe. What Rachel Mitchell tells me is, "It’s not my probe, we’re just helping the auditor general because we have the ability to issue subpoenas and do things that they can’t do." Auditor general hasn’t called us back; Rachel says, "Not my probe." So we’re waiting to see what happens. Obviously, if they come up with a different conclusion than Mayes, that raises a whole series of questions.

MARK BRODIE: Right. So, Howie, you mentioned the legal defense fund and some of the questions about that. And the governor has faced a lot of criticism for vetoing some bills that would have sort of in a broadly increased disclosures for these some of these kinds of contributions. Would legal defense funds have been included in either of those bills?

HOWIE FISCHER: Actually not. What was crafted by Senator T.J. Shope, who’s from Coolidge, said if you are bidding on a contract or if you have a contract, you have to go back and list for the last five years everything you’ve given to the governor, gubernatorial candidates, all of their funds — in other words, like the money the Democratic Party has earmarked for them — but did not mention legal defense fund. I think that was sort of an oversight by Mr. Shope, but he also knew that the bill was going to be vetoed, so it kind of became sort of performative art there. But there is a clear issue there. Now, at one point, legal defense monies were included in the law. It was usually a lawmaker gets a little bit of help with some finance forms and things like that. Now, it’s become this whole, basically open purse that people can use for whatever they determine is their legal defense, which could be a whole bunch of things.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, that’s really interesting. All right, well we’ll see if anything else comes, and as you say, another investigation, we’ll see the results of that at some point. That is Howie Fischer of Capitol Media Services. Howie, thank you as always.

HOWIE FISCHER: Have a great morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Picture this: A semi truck loaded with 40,000 pounds of frozen chicken worth more than $100,000 abandoned on the side of the I-40. Why? The driver was arrested and detained by Border Patrol. It’s become a frequent occurrence on highways today, according to our next guest, as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown extends to foreign-born truck drivers. Daniel Gonzalez covers immigration for the Arizona Republic and he’s in studio now to tell us more. Good morning.

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Good morning, nice to be here.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming in. So these truck drivers are arrested, detained by immigration authorities, then there are these massive loads of goods that are just left on the side of the road. This is all part of a bigger effort by the Trump administration to crack down on truck drivers. It’s called Operation Checkmate. Tell us about that. They say these folks are a danger on the roads essentially.

DANIEL GONZALEZ: So the Trump administration is focusing on kind of two classes of immigrant truck drivers: truck drivers who are not proficient in English and truck drivers who receive what’s called non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses. These are licenses that are issued to people who were born in other countries but live in the United States, and they have legal work permits, and through those legal work permits, they’re able to get a commercial driver’s licenses.

But as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, they have been taking away a lot of these work permits from people who are asylum seekers, TPS holders, people like those that are temporarily here, they don’t have actual status, but they have these work permits that allows them to work and get commercial truck drivers licenses.

So when they lose their work permits, they technically are no longer legal to have a commercial driver’s licenses, but often times the driver’s licenses, the expiration date exceeds the work permit dates, so those are the folks that the Trump administration is targeting. And it’s part of this overall mass deportation campaign that’s very much couched in a safety issue.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so the administration basically says this is about safety, right, like you said. That these folks don’t read English or speak English well enough to read the road signs or communicate during an inspection, things like that. Is there any proof of this?

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Well, I think they say that they are finding truck drivers on the roads when they pull them over who do not pass English proficiency tests and therefore should not be driving. But for example, the person that you mentioned in the beginning who had to abandon his load on the side of the I-40 ...

LAUREN GILGER: 40,000 pounds of frozen chicken, yeah.

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Yeah, well I interviewed him. He spoke fluent English extremely well. And so it raises the question of are some of these truck drivers really more that they’re pulling off the road really more about targeting immigrants than boosting the mass deportation campaign.

LAUREN GILGER: They cite some incidents in which there have been accidents involving foreign-born truck drivers, we should say. But when this happens, like you said, you interviewed this person who had to leave their load on the side of the road, the company has to fly someone out to go and drive that load somewhere else. They’re losing a lot of money on this, I’m guessing.

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Yeah, it affects the truck drivers and it affects consumers. In this particular case, he was driving a load of 40,000 pounds of frozen chicken that he had picked up at a processing plant in Indiana, and he was going to deliver it in California at a warehouse.

And on the way on I-40, he was followed by undercover Border Patrol agent, pulled over. He showed him his driver’s license, he showed him his work permit, he told him he had a pending asylum case, his asylum hearing was down the road. They took him, they detained him anyway, and he had to leave his — not only he left his entire rig there and then 40,000 pounds of frozen chicken, and then it took his owner, the owner of the vehicle, five days before he could actually get out to Arizona and pick up that truck.

LAUREN GILGER: So the other criticism here that advocates are pointing out, right, that is that these efforts seem to be aimed specifically at a certain group of immigrant truck drivers: Punjabi Sikh drivers. They wear turbans, practice a certain religion, look a certain way, right?

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Yeah, and going back to the other point that you made, and it fits in with the harassment that critics feel has been unleashed here. So there have been a number of high-profile accidents, and that’s what the Trump administration is using to justify this crackdown, and includes a very horrific accident that took place in the Florida Turnpike back in August of 2025, where an Indian-born truck driver was making a U-turn, he blocked three lanes of traffic, and three people were killed.

And there’s been a number of other spectacular, high-profile accidents like that that have involved immigrant truck drivers. So that’s the justification that the Trump administration is using for this crackdown. There’s no hard evidence that immigrant truck drivers are any more dangerous than other truck drivers, but nevertheless, that’s who they’re focusing on, and the largest group that are being targeted here are Indian Sikh Punjabi Sikh Indians.

And the concern is that this crackdown that has kind of painted Punjabi Sikh or Indian drivers as unsafe has unleashed this wave of harassment. So there’s some legal documents that include details based on interviews with some of these truck drivers that people are throwing water bottles at them, they’re hurling racial slurs at them. So there’s a very ugly aspect that has been unleashed here.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you about the other side of this, though, because the Arizona Trucking Association, for example, is happy about this crackdown. They say this is a good thing because of so-called bad actors. What’s their point of view?

DANIEL GONZALEZ: So their point of view is that after the pandemic, there was this huge need for truck drivers, and there was this big influx of foreign-born truck drivers into the trucking industry. And that coincided, as you recall, during the Biden administration where we had millions of asylum seekers crossing the border and making their way into the United States. A lot of those folks who are in the process of applying for asylum or have Temporary Protected Status, they qualify for work permits, and they are able to with these work permits apply for commercial driver’s licenses.

The Trucking Association feels that this kind of influx of truck drivers created a recession in the trucking industry where there was too many truck drivers that drove the price down, and some of these owners are trying to cut costs, and one of the ways they’re doing it is by hiring at lower pay truck drivers who may not be safe to be on the road.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, OK. So let’s talk briefly here in the last minute or so about what’s next. Attorney General Kris Mayes is getting involved. There is a lawsuit sort of pushing back on this crackdown on immigrant truck drivers. What would that do?

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Well, the lawsuit is part of this crackdown. The Trump administration has filed subpoenas to get the records of all these truck drivers that are held in a database that states control.

And the states, Democratic — it should be pointed out — Democratic attorneys general have filed a lawsuit countering that, saying this is an overreach, they’re just going on a fishing expedition, they want to get the personal records of millions of truck drivers to see what they can find out. So they’re fighting that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK. Lots to come on this front, I’m sure. Daniel Gonzalez covers immigration for the Arizona Republic, joining us to talk more about this story. Daniel, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for your reporting here.

DANIEL GONZALEZ: Thanks so much for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, Arizona is the only state in the Colorado River Basin whose Legislature will vote to approve Colorado River water cuts.

RITA MAGUIRE: No one has a clear understanding of what it means, because it’s never been tested.

MARK BRODIE: We’ll hear more about the role of the state Legislature established decades ago.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, school is back in session, and our next guest this morning is warning that as kids are back in the classroom, hundreds of Arizona schools could lose the ability to give them free lunches. Right now, nearly 300 schools in our state qualify for a federal program that allows schools that serve low-income households to give free lunches to every student without making them apply for it. If 25% of a school’s students qualify for food assistance programs like SNAP, they’re in. But as a result of the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Arizona has seen record numbers of people removed from the SNAP rolls. And there’s been pressure from congressional Republicans to raise the threshold for schools to qualify for those universal free lunches. David Lujan is executive director of Children’s Action Alliance and the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, which crunched the numbers on this, and I spoke with him more about it.

MARK BRODIE: The American Cancer Society estimates there were nearly 105,000 cases of melanoma reported in the U.S. in 2025. Between 1995 and 2023, the state Department of Health Services says there were more than 17,000 melanoma diagnoses in Arizona. Physicians at HonorHealth Research Institute, though, have been working on a new treatment in the form of a vaccine. Earlier trials have shown promise in treating glioblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor. This comes as the drugmaker Moderna says a similar vaccine was successful in a clinical trial of melanoma patients. Dr. Joseph Georges is a neurosurgeon at Scottsdale Neurosurgeon Specialists based at the Bob Bové Neuroscience Institute at HonorHealth. He’s also an assistant professor of clinical practice at ASU’s John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, and has been working on this. He joins me, and Dr. Georges, what could this treatment option be? And I wonder if there’s maybe a semantic question here, too, because it’s being described as a vaccine. And for lots of us, we think about a vaccine as something to prevent you from getting sick as opposed to treating you once you are.

JOSEPH GEORGES: That is a great question. And I think to answer that, you have to start at the level of the immune system. So all of us, our immune systems are designed to identify germs or pathogens in the body and target and destroy them before they can cause us a problem. It doesn’t just stop there. Our immune system can actually detect cancer cells and destroy them before they can cause us a problem, and our immune systems are constantly doing this, they’re surveying the landscape and looking for abnormal cells. Cancer, such as melanoma, they can get very good at camouflaging themselves, so our immune system can no longer identify them as abnormal, and it allows them to grow, develop tumors, and potentially spread throughout the body. So what a vaccine does is it re-educates the immune system to identify these camouflaged cells and once again seek them out and destroy them.

MARK BRODIE: So how exactly do you try to do that? It sounds like you’re almost giving a scent to a crime-fighting dog or something like that to try to search out these camouflaged melanoma cells.

JOSEPH GEORGES: Yes, it’s very much what we’re doing. So we obtain a biopsy from the patient, and then we use protein and mRNA. So what’s important about this vaccine, it’s a double-loaded dendritic cell vaccine. It’s using mRNA and protein, not just one of those items. And what we’ve found in preclinical studies is when we educate the dendritic cells with both protein and mRNA, we get an almost 10-fold increase in the immune response that we would have gotten with just using mRNA or just protein alone. So we extract dendritic cells from the patient’s bloodstream, and what those are, they’re basically the scouts of the immune system. They’re constantly traveling throughout the body, and those are the cells that identify abnormal things and report back to our immune system to then mount an attack against those abnormalities. So we extract these dendritic cells from the patient, we train them with the protein and the mRNA that we extract from the patient’s own tumor, and then we make them a very personalized vaccine that targets just their cancer. And it allows their immune system to very naturally once again identify and destroy these cancer cells.

MARK BRODIE: Given that you are taking samples, as you say, from each patient, is that to suggest that something like this, at least at this stage, would not necessarily be useful as a typical preventative vaccine, since if you’re taking something from the patient, you obviously can’t do that if they don’t have cancer yet?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Correct, but cancers happen at many stages. So if you have a very localized tumor that hasn’t spread through the body, you could still isolate it, and the question I have is, if you provide a vaccine to somebody like that, could you potentially prevent them from developing further cancer throughout their body? That’s very important for me as a neurosurgeon looking at melanoma because it is a different organ system. But of all the cancers we see, melanoma has the highest likelihood to spread to the brain. So if we can identify it early, a question I have is, if a patient were to be vaccinated at that point, could we prevent it from ever going to the brain?

MARK BRODIE: Well, that’s really interesting, because I was going to ask if you have reason to believe that if a melanoma patient gets this vaccine, if it would maybe lower the risk of melanoma reappearing, of coming back in a patient. But it sounds like there’s also the possibility that it could help it spread and maybe prevent cancers elsewhere.

JOSEPH GEORGES: That’s the hope, and that’s what we are — well, that’s one of the end points we’re evaluating in this clinical trial.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have reason to think that this might be effective for other types of cancer to begin with, in addition to melanoma patients, like patients with other types of cancer this could be effective in?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Oh, absolutely. So this actually started with work when we collaborated to develop a vaccine for glioblastoma, and that clinical trial opened in 2021 and finished enrolling two years later. And we saw on average patients who enrolled in that trial have done far better than ever expected with no significant side effects. And we have another clinical trial using the same vaccine technology for pancreatic cancer as well.

MARK BRODIE: Is there anything similar about those particular types of cancer that might lend them to all working or having success with similar types of treatments?

JOSEPH GEORGES: They’re very different cancers, and what’s exciting was to see a potentially positive signal in glioblastoma because historically that has been one of the most aggressive and difficult cancers to treat, especially for the immune system to target. It’s very challenging for our immune system to identify glioblastoma. Melanoma, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. We’ve found that when we can bolster the immune system in patients with various medications, the immune system can do a good job of targeting and controlling that tumor, at least for a time.

MARK BRODIE: Is the thinking, at least at this point, that assuming that the tests and the trials continue to work positively, that this kind of treatment would be used in conjunction with other traditional forms of cancer treatment? Might this be all a patient needs?

JOSEPH GEORGES: It’s possible. The way we design these trials is that the vaccine is in addition to other treatments that could potentially help the patient. So it comes down to the discretion of the oncologist. We don’t want any patient to have to forego a treatment that could potentially help them. You may have seen there was a Moderna vaccine that was in the news. So with their vaccine, it was their vaccine, which is an mRNA vaccine, plus a checkpoint inhibitor. So could something like that work with our vaccine? We will see, but we do have patients that are receiving our vaccine that may or may not be responding to the checkpoint inhibitors anymore.

MARK BRODIE: Are there reasons to think that it is better for the body if you’re using its own immune system to fight cancer as opposed to having to use chemotherapy or radiation or other things like that?

JOSEPH GEORGES: Well, the immune system, it’s a more natural way to control and kill cancer. We see sometimes when patients start failing therapies, they’re willing to trade some terrible side effects with chemotherapeutics with the hope that they’ll have some help, that it may help. But with this double-loaded dendritic cell vaccine that AIVAC has developed, we’ve seen that patients don’t get sick, they don’t lose their hair, so the side effect profile seems much more favorable than some other treatment options out there.

MARK BRODIE: Ultimately, do you think this could be something that would be functional for every form of cancer that’s out there?

JOSEPH GEORGES: I think there’s a very good chance, yes. I think if the immune system can be educated how to once detect these abnormal cells again, I think it could be effective across a full complement of cancer types.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Dr. Joseph Georges, a neurosurgeon at Scottsdale Neurosurgeon Specialists based out of the Bob Bové Neuroscience Institute at HonorHealth. He’s also an assistant professor of clinical practice at ASU’s John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering. Dr. Georges, thanks so much, I appreciate it.

JOSEPH GEORGES: Thank you, appreciate it.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. New rules for sharing water from the Colorado River are here, and Arizona stands to take the biggest hit. The federal government wrote the rules for the seven states that use the river, but Arizona is the only state where lawmakers can vote to approve them. With the new Colorado River plan heading for the Statehouse, KJZZ’s Alex Hager and Camryn Sanchez teamed up to find out how much power the Legislature actually has.

ALEX HAGER: Big cuts are coming for the amount of Colorado River water that flows to Arizona, meaning less water for cities around Phoenix. The cuts are pretty much final. They come after years of negotiations, and Arizona sent a representative to those talks. So why are state lawmakers getting involved now?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Our search for the reason took us back decades, long before the river was shrinking due to drought and climate change, and long before this round of talks about bringing down demand. This idea has roots in the ’40s.

ALEX HAGER: It was officially written into law in 1980 and hasn’t been changed since. And it’s only one sentence long.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: It basically says the state’s water negotiator can enter into an agreement with the federal government or another state, but it’s not effective until the Legislature signs off.

ALEX HAGER: When we reached out to experts for this story, nearly everyone — law researchers, former officials, and sitting representatives — was a little unsure of what exactly the Legislature can do.

RITA MAGUIRE: No one has a clear understanding of what it means, because it’s never been tested.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Rita Maguire served as Arizona’s top water official in the ’90s and early 2000s. She was appointed by the governor to negotiate with other states. She says the law was written to provide some checks and balances in a system where one person, like her, negotiates for the state’s water.

ALEX HAGER: But how exactly those checks get applied, that is where things get complicated. Rhett Larson is a water law professor at Arizona State University. He says once the federal government releases its plan for managing the river, there’s not much Arizona lawmakers can do.

RHETT LARSON: The federal government couldn’t care less if the state Legislature approves or disapproves.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: But there are other deals the Legislature can weigh in on. In addition to the federal plan, there’s an agreement between Arizona, California and Nevada to conserve water. Larson says the Legislature can vote on that in a special session.

ALEX HAGER: And Larson says if the state has to figure out how to cut back on a big amount of water use within Arizona, it can do that in the special session.

RHETT LARSON: If there needs to be state-level legislative changes in order to implement an agreement, then the state Legislature becomes important.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Larson predicts that session will open a whole can of worms, with lawmakers looking at overhauling other water policies to make up for the Colorado River cuts.

RHETT LARSON: But as long as we’re all in the room, how about we make the following changes to groundwater management to respond to lower, to less Colorado River water? That’s probably the more likely and the more interesting outcome.

ALEX HAGER: When it comes to water matters lawmakers can control, the question is, how will they vote?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Senator Priya Sundareshan says divvying up water could create a divide between rural and urban representatives, since lawmakers won’t want to vote for a proposal that makes their legislative district suffer.

PRIYA SUNDARESHAN: When we do have to figure out which users take more cuts than others, I think that’s where we will start to see the controversy and the concerns and perhaps some increased fighting occur.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: If lawmakers end up rejecting whatever water proposal ultimately goes up for a vote, Senate Natural Resources Chairman T.J. Shope predicts the issue will end up in court.

T.J. SHOPE: The impact of what these negotiations are, it’s probably the single, some of the biggest decisions that anybody will make in their entire legislative or gubernatorial career.

ALEX HAGER: But ask the current top water official in Arizona, and he’ll tell you there won’t be any curveballs when the Colorado River plans he helped write go to the Legislature.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Tom Buschatzke says he’s been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, and anything he agrees to is already the product of lots of meetings with people across Arizona, including lawmakers.

TOM BUSCHATZKE: I’m not going to really end up at the Legislature if I don’t already know from laying all the groundwork that there’s a very, very good chance that they’re going to approve what we’re putting in front of them.

ALEX HAGER: He says even though lawmakers technically have a check on his work, it doesn’t feel like a burden, because he won’t sign anything that people in Arizona refuse to go along with.

TOM BUSCHATZKE: If your deal is not implementable and the people who are impacted by it or have to implement won’t, then your deal’s going to fall apart.

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Buschatzke says if he agrees to a Colorado River plan that Arizonans refuse to comply with, then it’s just a piece of paper. From the KJZZ newsroom, I’m Camryn Sanchez.

ALEX HAGER: And I’m Alex Hager.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. The Arizona Daily Star is nearly 150 years old, but it hasn’t been immune to the economic reality facing newspapers today. The Tucson paper laid off nearly 25% of its staff in 2023, but our next guest this morning made it through and says she’s hopeful about the continued need for local news. Alexis Huicochea is a native of Tucson who’s just been named the paper’s new executive editor. She’s been at the paper for 21 years and told me she started as an overnight crime reporter.

ALEXIS HUICOCHEA: So when I got started here at the Arizona Daily Star, I was a crime reporter. So there were plenty of interesting stories at the time. The beat required that I handle these situations, handle these stories with great care because I was encountering people at really tragic times in their lives, and it was my job to convey their stories, to share their stories in a respectful way, and also to put into context for our community what resources are available to people within our community, and also what government officials are doing to address the situations that we were facing within our community. There was this really interesting story. I recall I worked nights when I first came on at the Arizona Daily Star. I was listening to the police scanner, as most cops reporters do. I was alone in the newsroom, and I heard over the police scanner that there was an earthmover, which is this gigantic piece of construction equipment — it looks like it sounds, an earthmover — that was riding down one of our main roadways, Grant Road, and the police were trying to stop it. And I called my editor immediately and let them know what was going on. And he said, "Well, go follow it." And so that really showed me. I jumped into my car, got on the road, and rather than trying to drive away from where the earthmover was barreling down the roadway and had the potential to roll over vehicles like tin cans, I drove toward that to see what I could learn.

LAUREN GILGER: Always going into the fire as a journalist, right? So you’ve spent your whole career there, you’ve been an editor there for some time as well, and now you’re taking the helm as executive editor. What does that feel like at this point in your career and as someone who is born and raised from Tucson and now is taking the helm of the big paper there?

ALEXIS HUICOCHEA: So it’s an incredible honor to have been named executive editor. I’ve been here for 21 years. I spent the first half of that as a reporter. I was born and raised in Tucson, and I’ve always been impressed as a teenager reading the coverage that the Arizona Daily Star had with the compelling storytelling, with the insight that reporters were able to give. They were just really always the expert voice as far as I was concerned before I started working here. And so it was always my goal to come back home to Tucson and to work at the Arizona Daily Star. And once I got my foot in the door, I just felt so proud to be here. And so having the opportunity to now lead this newsroom, it’s something that is a dream come true, not because I look for the accolades. I’ve never wanted to be the story myself personally. I’ve just always spent my career trying to produce the strongest work possible, because that is the way that I can personally serve my community. I don’t have the skills to be a doctor. I am not out fighting fires, but what I know I can do is I can dig into stories and find stories and convey them in a way that makes sense to people and give them the information that they need to know.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it sounds like you clearly are passionate about local journalism. But let me ask you about the landscape in terms of news right now, not just in Tucson, but really around the country. I mean, the decimation of print newspapers, the Star laid off 10 people in its newsroom just a few years ago and ended its Spanish-language sister paper as well. What’s the future of papers like the Daily Star look like to you in terms of how you find business models, how you maintain staff and sort of that community voice in the future?

ALEXIS HUICOCHEA: You know, the industry has evolved, like you said, across the country since I’ve gotten into it, but more so over a longer period of time. I think the one thing that remains true is that people still need verified information, and they need expert journalists who will hold government officials accountable, who can get access to documents, who can cut into these deep topics that impact people’s everyday lives. And I genuinely believe that the Arizona Daily Star is doing a really good job of it. We are a newspaper first and foremost, that’s how we got our start, but we also have our digital presence, and we work every day to strategize to how we can meet people where they are. We know they’re constantly looking at their phones, so we’re pushing news to their phones. We know they’re scrolling on social media, and maybe that’s the way that they’re going to encounter what they need to know, so we focus on getting our stories out on as many platforms as we can. We understand that people are very visual now, maybe they want video, so we are constantly adapting our strategies to make sure that we are delivering the kind of news that people expect and need in their lives in the way that they are comfortable with accessing it.

LAUREN GILGER: Are you hopeful for the future of local news?

ALEXIS HUICOCHEA: I really am. I think the fact that there are so many independent news organizations that have been popping up to be able to fill voids, because as you have said, we at the Star have laid off staff, as have newspapers and television stations across the country. But people are still seeking out this information, and there’s so much misinformation out there, especially with how much access people have to the internet, that it’s important to try to cut through that. So even if it’s not being presented in the way that we do it now, I really do believe that in some form there will be a place for the kind of journalism that we do at the Arizona Daily Star.

LAUREN GILGER: We’ll end on a hopeful note. Alexis Huicochea joining us, new executive editor of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. Alexis, thank you so much for coming on The Show. Good luck and congratulations.

ALEXIS HUICOCHEA: Thank you so much.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.