Taproot Publishing

But the story begins long before that. Co-founders Mack Male and Karen Unland started talking about improving local journalism at such events as ChangeCamp in 2009 and MediaCamp in 2010, when Karen was the digital editor at the Edmonton Journal, and Mack was a software engineer with a popular blog focused on civic affairs. They kept the conversatio... n going, through Karen's decision to leave the Journal newsroom to pursue teaching and entrepreneurship in 2011, as well as a lot of community involvement on Mack's part. In January of 2016, Postmedia merged the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun newsrooms as part of a consolidation of broadsheet and tabloid properties that also happened in Calgary, Ottawa and Vancouver. In Edmonton, that meant the loss of about 30 jobs and the departure of several newsroom leaders. This event shifted Mack and Karen's mindset from "let's keep talking about this" to "let's do something." They came up with Taproot Edmonton, a source of local "how-and-why" journalism inspired by the curiosity of members and funded by membership fees. They put up a landing page and soft-launched the idea at an event called "Journalist Interrupted" at MacEwan University in May of 2016. Enough people agreed to become members in those very early days to encourage Mack and Karen to keep going. They built something called a "Story Garden," where members could plant the seed of a story idea by asking a question; if other members were also curious, a storyteller would be assigned to pursue the answer, which Taproot would then publish. They brought that idea to a wider audience at Startup Edmonton's Launch Party 7 in October of 2016, and incorporated the company in January of 2017. This was a good start, but the pace of publishing that such a system supported made it hard to build up momentum. At the same time, they had the insight that curating information on a topic is also a valuable service. Mack had learned that through his Edmonton Notes and Media Monday, and Karen had seen it through her Seen and Heard in ...Read More