"I get to cover Arizona politicos in all their glory and then get paid for writing about it. What more could you want?"--3/23/17

Last day of committees! I was actually in House Ways and Means this morning, which was something I hadn't done in a while (tbh not much had changed), so it was nice to see some familiar faces and Rep. Ugenti-Rita rocking it as chairwoman. I won't talk about any of the bills, even though they were pretty interesting, because they don't really affect any of our lives personally (unless you work for the city and the city owns a hotel), but I encourage all of you to watch it all here.

After the floor (where not much was going on), I then went to Senate Government, where I didn't get to see many of the bills on the agenda because the members spent a lot of time discussing one of the strike-everything amendments to a bill that was being heard (in case I haven't mentioned, a strike everything amendment is an amendment that is proposed that deletes everything in the bill and pretty much gets replaced by something completely different- for some legislators, this is a way to introduce bills after committees stop hearing new things). The proposed amendment was going to install GPS systems in school buses to collect data as a part of a pilot program (ie a new thing they will do for a year) to analyze efficiency and possibly save the state money, considering Arizona reimburses the schools for gas for the school buses. After much debate, when voting one Senator was having a tough time deliberating, and so they called recess in the middle of voting and kicked the public out of the room. At that point, I left because it was time for me to go anyways, but the bill passed.

And now for the quote, which actually comes from Howard Fischer, a reporter. I wanted to use some time to talk about how my research has been going outside my time at the capitol since some of you have been asking and I haven't really discussed it yet. When I began my project, I wanted to track bill coverage in the media as it went through the legislature; however, if you haven't noticed by the number of bills I've been talking about, that it pretty much impossible to do. And from what I've been researching, the news media and film/television (which were other parts I was going to study) don't really cover the state legislature at all. So for now, I've been shifting through newspaper articles, and I won't get too much into it because this post is pretty long already, I will point out one thing that I have noticed. Even though there are 20+ newspapers in the state, many of the local newspapers (like the Yuma Sun, for example), don't actually employ any journalists to cover the state legislature. Instead, this journalist, Howard Fischer, who founded this company called Capitol Media Services, writes articles which he sells to all of these local papers who only use his articles. Meaning, that many Arizonans are only getting news from this one guy. Crazy right? The quote of the day is from his Twitter bio, which you should take a look at. So anyways, I wanted to give you guys a glimpse at what my research has been focused on, but if you have any questions or suggestions I would really appreciate it. Also, sorry my posts have been coming out kinda late, the last couple of weeks have been kinda hectic (which isn't really an excuse, but I wanted to apologize anyways). And because you read all of this, here is an Arizona meme because it's the state legislature and we need to keep our memes local:

what ms. mitrovich 100% intended when she said add more photos