Welcome to the Taproot Publishing blog

Welcome to our new blog!

Wait — didn’t Taproot already have a blog? Yes, if you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we have been blogging at taprootedmonton.ca for the past few years. But not anymore. Allow me to explain!

When we launched Taproot Edmonton back in 2016, all we had was a landing page. Initially we updated our members and readers exclusively through our email newsletter. Then in 2018, we launched a Taproot Edmonton blog. "A blog is an excellent tool to communicate what we’re working on, which is why we’re launching this one now," I wrote at the time. We were busy launching our roundups, and we used the blog to help spread the word about those efforts.

What you may not have realized is that our company is actually called Taproot Publishing Inc., a decision we made intentionally to reflect our ambition to create something that could grow beyond our hometown. Nowadays we think of Taproot Edmonton not only as the first of (hopefully) many local sites, but also as just one of the products that our company offers.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a bit strange to share updates about our company, such as when we were selected to participate in ATB X, in the same place we published original journalism about Edmonton. It was OK when Taproot Edmonton was the only thing our company did, but that’s no longer the case.

Over the past few years, we’ve settled on a unique (and we think innovative) approach to making local media sustainable: we’re using the tools of journalism to offer B2B services to organizations, which provides a new and growing revenue stream alongside membership and sponsorship. We will have much more to share about our services in the future, and this blog is the place we’ll do just that. We’ll also use this space to share news about Taproot Edmonton, our other products, and our thoughts on the future of local media.

We’ve still got some work to do to make our web presence fully reflect what Taproot Publishing has evolved into, but this is a start. We’re excited to keep you informed about what we’re doing as we build a company that helps communities understand themselves better.