About Taproot Edmonton

Taproot Edmonton

Overview

Taproot Edmonton is an independent digital news organisation serving Edmonton and its surrounding region in Alberta, published online at edmonton.taproot.news by Taproot Publishing Inc. It was founded by Karen Unland, a former journalist turned entrepreneur, and Mack Male, a longtime Edmonton blogger, community organiser and software developer, and it began publishing in September 2016 with an unusual proposition: paying members would decide what its journalists investigated. Members plant story ideas — questions about the city — in what Taproot calls its Story Garden, rate one another's questions by curiosity, and the ideas that attract the most interest are assigned to writers to be reported out. Everything Taproot publishes is free to read.

A decade on, the organisation has grown well beyond its original experiment. Its best-known product is The Pulse, a free weekday news briefing for the Edmonton region, published alongside topic newsletters and roundups, a comprehensive events calendar and the civic-affairs podcast Speaking Municipally. Taproot sums up its role as delivering "reliable intelligence about the Edmonton region," and in June 2026 its work was recognised nationally when it won the Dr. Eric Jackman Award for Excellence in Journalism in the small media category at the Canadian Journalism Foundation's awards gala.

History

Taproot grew out of a contraction in Edmonton's established newsrooms. In January 2016, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun and laid off dozens of journalists — contemporary reporting in Editor & Publisher put the Edmonton losses at 35 people. Unland and Male began working that month on an alternative model for local news, workshopping the idea in public at a "Journalist Interrupted" event at MacEwan University on May 26, 2016.

Taproot Edmonton began publishing in September 2016. Its founding mechanism was the Story Garden: members, paying $10 a month or $100 a year at launch, could plant questions they wanted answered, score other members' questions on a "curiosity slider" from one to five, and watch the questions that gained traction get assigned to freelance contributors working in a virtual newsroom. Contributors were credited on the stories they produced, and every writer was a member first. At launch the community was small — more than 80 members and a dozen or so freelancers, as Editor & Publisher reported at the time — but the model drew attention well beyond Edmonton as an experiment in audience-led commissioning.

Taproot Publishing Inc., the company behind the publication, dates its own founding to 2017, describing itself as the product of "years of work and conversation about the future of local journalism in Edmonton." The name was chosen with the city in mind: as Unland has explained on the company's blog, "taproots like radishes and carrots grow well in Edmonton, and we thought we might, too." Over the following years the Story Garden's curiosity-driven stories were joined by daily and weekly briefing products and a podcast, and the company marked its tenth anniversary in May 2026.

Content and Coverage

Taproot's journalism is organised around the Edmonton region's civic life: city hall and municipal politics, regional governance, business and technology, health innovation, food, arts and community events. Its original stories still follow the founding model — questions planted and rated by the community are reported out by Taproot's staff and freelance contributors — and they sit alongside a set of regular briefing products that summarise and curate the region's news.

The Pulse is the flagship: a free weekday briefing that assembles the day's essential Edmonton-region news for subscribers each morning. Around it sit topic roundups and newsletters, including the Regional Roundup, which tracks news and development across the metropolitan region beyond the city itself. During election periods Taproot runs the People's Agenda, a project that asks residents which issues they want candidates to address and builds its election coverage around the answers — an extension of the same curiosity-led method as the Story Garden.

Speaking Municipally, Taproot's podcast about Edmonton city politics, follows the council calendar, working through the week's decisions and debates; episodes published in May 2026 featured hosts including Mack Male and Troy Henderson, with appearances by Taproot reporter Colin Gallant. Taproot also maintains a comprehensive calendar of events in Edmonton, one of the most heavily used parts of its website.

Audience and Reach

Taproot does not publish audited audience figures, and none are claimed here. Its standing is best documented by its role in Edmonton's civic conversation and by national recognition. On June 10, 2026, at the Canadian Journalism Foundation's awards gala in Toronto, Taproot received the Dr. Eric Jackman Award for Excellence in Journalism in the small media category, an award honouring news organisations whose work has a positive impact on the communities they serve; Male and Unland accepted the award by video. The other nominees in the category included The Green Line, the Investigative Journalism Foundation in partnership with The Narwhal, The Sprawl and The Trillium — company that places Taproot among the most regarded independent local news organisations in Canada.

Its own advertising material addresses prospective sponsors in terms of audience quality rather than quantity, describing its readers as "the smartest, most-engaged people in the Edmonton region" — the company's own characterisation, presented here as such. Its audience is concentrated in Edmonton and its surrounding municipalities, reached through free email briefings, the website, the podcast and membership.

Digital Presence

Taproot Edmonton publishes entirely online. Its newsletters — The Pulse on weekday mornings and its topic roundups through the week — are delivered by email to subscribers, and all of its journalism is free to read on the website; membership is a way of supporting and steering the coverage rather than a paywall. The Speaking Municipally podcast is distributed through the major podcast platforms and was publishing new episodes in May 2026, weeks before the company's tenth-anniversary and awards coverage appeared on its blog at blog.taprootpublishing.ca in May and June 2026 — evidence of an organisation publishing on schedule and operating at full capacity a decade after launch. Its events calendar and story archive are maintained on the main site, and the company site at taprootpublishing.ca carries its corporate information, including its Spotlight service for organisations.

Ownership and Organisation

Taproot Edmonton is published by Taproot Publishing Inc., the independent Edmonton company founded in 2017 by Mack Male and Karen Unland, who remain its leaders a decade later — it was Male and Unland who accepted the company's Jackman Award in June 2026. The company is locally owned and is part of the independent-media sector's professional networks: it is a member of LION Publishers, the association for local independent online news publishers, is affiliated with Press Forward, the collaborative of Canadian independent publishers, and lists QCJO among its affiliations.

Alongside its public-facing journalism, Taproot Publishing operates Spotlight, a briefing service that helps organisations pay attention to the communities they serve — a business extension of the same monitoring and summarising craft behind The Pulse. Revenue for the journalism comes from memberships, advertising and sponsorships; the Regional Roundup, for example, has carried a title sponsor, Park Power. Unland's work extends across the local media community: she is also president of the Alberta Podcast Network and a co-host of the podcast That's a Thing?!.

Contact and Availability

Taproot Edmonton is available free online at edmonton.taproot.news, where readers anywhere can read its stories, browse its events calendar and subscribe by email to The Pulse and its other newsletters at no charge. Membership, which supports the work and lets readers take part in setting the reporting agenda in the Story Garden tradition, is offered through the website. Speaking Municipally is available on major podcast platforms. Information for advertisers and sponsors is published on the site, and the company's organisational home is taprootpublishing.ca. Taproot is based in Edmonton, Alberta, and its coverage area is the Edmonton region.