Alexis Huicochea named Star editor

The move comes three months after David McCumber in May left the role he had held for three years to become a senior reporter with the Star’s parent company, Lee Enterprises.

"Alexis represents the very best of our industry's aspirations when it comes to promoting committed community members to top local news leadership roles," said Jason Adrians, Lee Enterprises' chief content officer, who made the announcement Tuesday. "Her commitment to fair and balanced journalism, and lifetime of service to Tucson and the surrounding area, paired with her stewardship of the Daily Star news and sports staffs, make Alexis the right choice for all the right reasons. Our company is excited for Alexis, her family, and the entire community."

“I'm very excited,” Huicochea said. “I still feel very much like I'm early in my career, even though I'm 21 years in, and this opportunity arose sooner in my career than I thought it would. But I just genuinely care so much about the Tucson community, and I want to serve the community,”

Under her leadership, Huicochea, 43, said the Star will remain focused on telling the stories of Tucson and Southern Arizona and serving the communities that call the region home.

“The Arizona Daily Star is nearly 150 years old, and in my two decades there, it's evolved so much,” she said. “I just feel like the work that we do is extremely, extremely valuable, whether it's the watchdog reporting, whether it's the features reporting, whether it's the sports reporting. Our staff is loaded with people who have such expertise on everything that they're writing about. I just feel like everything that we cover, everything that we provide to the community, is always coming from the angle of how can we serve our community. That's something that we're going to continue to do on the highest level possible.”

The Star also will continue looking for ways to meet readers where they are, including on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X.

“We were a print publication first, and we still are a print publication. We take a lot of pride in that,” she said. “But we want to deliver the news that they need in the way that they want. … I think it's just really important that we continue to meet people where they are, provide them their news in the way they want, and make sure that we're presenting as comprehensive a picture of what's happening in Tucson and how it's impacting people in Tucson as much as possible.”

Huicochea, who has been with the Star since graduating college in 2005, spent the first half of her career as a reporter before becoming an editor, overseeing the Star’s news, business, features and, more recently, sports coverage.

She grew up on Tucson’s south side, raised by a single, working mother who introduced her to the Star. The family, which included a younger sister, got the newspaper every Sunday.

While her mother was mostly interested in the coupons, Huicochea was interested in the news.

“I would always read the stories, and I can recall being in high school and specifically reading the crime stories,” she said

In those pages, Huicochea became enamored by the reporting from former crime reporters Leslie Anne Newell and Becky Pallack.

“They would always write these really compelling crime stories where they would talk about some really devastating situation that occurred, and they would take you really deeply into it,” Huicochea said. “But they did it in a way where they would identify trends and what this means for the community, and it was just such a big picture look. I just knew I wanted to be the person who knows all of this information and shares it with the community and makes a difference in that way.”

After graduating from Desert View High School, Huicochea attended the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University; she had full-ride offers to ASU and the University of Arizona.

She wrote for ASU’s student newspaper, The State Press, and was its sports editor, which helped her land summer internships on the Star’s sports copy desk.

She graduated from ASU in 3½ years and applied for a job with the Star in December 2004; a few months later in March 2005, she was hired as a police reporter, a job she found to be challenging and rewarding.

“I was meeting people more than likely at the worst points of their life in a really vulnerable state, and it taught me a lot about how to communicate with these people and get an understanding of their stories,” she said. “It taught me how to be really sensitive, to tell those stories in a way that they deserve to be told and also to utilize those moments to help people understand what was happening in the community.”

Her five years on the police beat also opened her eyes to the compassion of the Tucson community.

“I can recall writing a story about a family that lost their home in a fire, and I had gone out and spoken to them,” she said. “There's just a lot of things people don't think about when they see a home on fire, what these people are losing in response and how they're trying to get their lives back together. So I believe I tried to tell that story, and in response, I had so many readers who wanted to make donations to this family. … It just really showed me who Tucson is.”

She moved onto the K-12 education beat, and on her first day, a major decision came down on Tucson Unified School District’s decades-long desegregation lawsuit. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal judge’s decision to end court oversight of TUSD’s desegregation plans, which led to reinstating federal court oversight. Huicochea had to catch up on an issue that had been ongoing nearly 50 years.

“I had a really hard day that day because I was overwhelmed by a court ruling on a beat that I had no understanding of,” she recalled. “I'm a very resourceful person, and I think as reporters we generally are. If there's something I don't know how to do, I'm going to figure out how to do it.”

Huicochea said her career path at the Star was guided by editors who trusted in her, including longtime senior editor Hipolito Corella, who “encouraged me to take every step that I've taken at the Star.”

Huicochea and her husband, Mario Balderrama, have two children, Max, 13, and Olivia, 7.