Category: Local Media

Declaring our roundup experiment a success

We’re declaring the experiment we started last month a success. Now when you open a roundup, you’ll find a message from a member of our team pulling some threads together in the Taproot way — with curiosity and desire to understand our community better.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback. Here’s a sample of the things we heard:

  • "I love the new roundup format."
  • "I really like the new opening perspective from the editor."
  • "I’m writing to tell you I’m enjoying the new format of the roundup. I think it’s a great addition."

We’re grateful for the evidence that this approach is working!

Our previous format was to include a story at the top of the roundup, which meant there was duplication between the roundups and The Pulse. We want to encourage you to subscribe to The Pulse for a daily look at what’s happening in Edmonton, and to the roundups for deeper dives into what’s happening in tech, food, health innovation, the region, the arts, and business. The new format makes that more likely.

“I like to start my notes to you as if we’re in the middle of a conversation,” Meg Ryan’s character says in You’ve Got Mail.

We think the new format makes the roundups themselves more engaging. Instead of dropping you right into a story, we greet you in a more conversational way without any unnecessary preamble (as we always strive to save you time). I’m reminded of Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail, who writes to Tom Hanks’s character, "I like to start my notes to you as if we’re in the middle of a conversation."

One of the things we’ve learned through the experiment is that this format is a useful way for us to connect the dots. While each edition of a roundup is informative on its own, paying attention to a topic over time yields greater benefits. We notice patterns, connections, and trends that we can share, and the new format is a good way to do that.

What’s next?

We’ll still write stories about our roundup topics even with the new format in place, and you’ll still find them curated into items for the roundups they fit best. Those stories will also make it into The Pulse. But the new format provides us with some operational flexibility that we’re excited to take full advantage of.

For instance, in The Pulse you’ll increasingly find stories like our look at the community sandbox program, which doesn’t exactly fit one of the roundup beats. It also means we can publish stories like today’s about Future Fields securing US$11.2 million in funding whenever it makes sense to do so, not just because it fits a particular day’s roundup.

We’re working on additional improvements to the roundups, The Pulse, and our website, and we’ll have more to share on that soon. If you have any feedback on what would make the reader experience even better, please let us know!

And as always, if you’d like to help us go further faster, become a Taproot member or sponsor. You’ll be helping us build what comes next in local journalism.

Kicking off 2023 with an experiment

We’re trying something new at the top of some of our roundups, as part of our continuing quest to build a sustainable, tech-enabled media business that helps our community understand itself better.

Taproot is experimenting again, as we are wont to do. (Alex Kondratiev/Unsplash)

Instead of a story at the top of the Jan. 17 Food Roundup and the Jan. 18 Health Innovation Roundup, you’ll see a message from the editor pulling together some threads in a meaningful way. We pay a lot of attention to these topics, and sometimes we notice things that aren’t really stories and aren’t really items, but are still worth attention and context. That’s what we’d like to provide at the top of the roundups, in a way that’s more conversational than our usual editorial voice.

We’ll try this again with a couple of other roundups next week to see if we’ve hit on a format that will stick. We’d love to know what you think — send your thoughts to hello@taprootedmonton.ca.

Why are we doing this?

Change is the Taproot way. We started with long-form features inspired by readers’ questions, and we published them as soon as we had the time and money to put them out, which in the early days was at a pretty slow cadence. Then we introduced roundups, our weekly newsletters gathering items on specific topics, serving readers’ curiosity in a different and more frequent way and opening up a new revenue stream via sponsorship. Their format has evolved over time.

Two years ago, we launched The Pulse, a weekday newsletter that distributes our stories and curates news and items from other sources to help Edmontonians get on with their day in an informed way. That product has become the centre of our editorial work, and its readership is much higher than that of any roundup.

When we started The Pulse, it made sense to distribute the stories that we wrote for the various roundup beats in that newsletter, along with elements that are only distributed in The Pulse, such as some of our city council coverage, our weekly moment in history, and our event listings.

Now we’d like to differentiate the content of The Pulse from that of the roundups, partly for some operational flexibility but also because we think it will be a better experience for readers. We want to encourage you to subscribe to The Pulse for a daily look at what’s happening in Edmonton, and to the roundups for deeper dives into what’s happening in tech, food, health innovation, the region, the arts, and business. You may have a greater incentive to do that with less duplication.

Will we still have stories on our roundup beats?

Many of our story ideas emerge from the topics our readers want us to pay attention to, so we will naturally continue to cover stories that fit our roundup beats, whether this new format sticks around or not. Those stories will continue to be curated into items for the roundups they fit into, as is our practice now.

This gives us the flexibility to publish daily stories that aren’t necessarily related to or timed with a particular roundup. We think this could improve the quality of our work.

What’s next?

We’ll experiment with this for a couple of weeks, then make a call on whether to keep doing it. If we do, that will likely lead to some other changes we’re considering to improve the experience for readers and paying members.

As always, if you’d like to help us go further faster, become a Taproot member or sponsor. You’ll be helping us build what comes next in local journalism.

Speaking Municipally shortlisted for Canadian Podcast Award

Vote for Speaking Municipally in the Canadian Podcast Awards before Aug. 10, 2022!

We’re proud to see Speaking Municipally once again nominated for a Canadian Podcast Award.

Mack Male and Troy Pavlek have been paying close attention to city council on Edmontonians’ behalf since August 2018. It’s wonderful to see all of their hours of watching meetings and combing through agendas rewarded with this recognition, as it was when the show was nominated last year.

The Canadian Podcast Awards are voted on by other Canadian podcasters. If you happen to be one of those, you could cast your vote for Speaking Municipally in this category: “Outstanding News & Current Affairs Series.” Voting closes on Aug. 10, 2022.

While you’re there, consider voting for fellow Alberta Podcast Network members Putting It Together, Makeshift Stories, Quantum Kickflip, and 2 and Out.

There’s strong Edmonton-area representation among the other nominees, including The Smile Syndicate and Water We Doing, as well as a couple of podcasts we’ve written about before: Canadian History Ehx and Super Awesome Science Show.

By the way, Taproot has another show you might want to check out: Bloom, a podcast about innovation in Edmonton. We’re up to 25 episodes now, featuring interesting conversations with folks such as Jalene Anderson-Baron of Future Fields, Brian Heath of Drivewyze, Chris Kallal of Wild + Pine, and Tiffany Linke-Boyko of Flying Fish Partners.

Here’s something city council can do right now to support local journalism

Edmonton’s city council passed a motion on June 7 that we didn’t cover over at Taproot Edmonton, but we certainly took note of as a local media company.

The motion, made by Coun. Ben Henderson and seconded by Coun. Scott McKeen, carried 13-0. Here’s what it says:

The City of Edmonton council recognizes that a healthy, professional news media is essential to the proper functioning of democracy in our city; urges nearby municipal councils and across Canada to recognize that a robust news media is essential to the proper functioning of democracy in their jurisdictions; endorses legislation and regulations to support and rejuvenate news outlets across Canada; and urges the federal government to move quickly to pass legislation to ensure an ecosystem for a healthy news media to serve all Canadians.

Edmonton City Council meeting, June 7, 2021

Henderson said similar motions have been passed by municipalities across the country. This campaign coincides with an effort by News Media Canada to step up pressure on the federal government to pass legislation to "rein in" Google and Facebook before Parliament rises for the summer amid anticipation of a fall election. The newspaper lobby would like something similar to what Australia passed earlier this year requiring Google and Facebook to negotiate compensation agreements with publishers.

Henderson said he didn’t know the specifics of the federal legislation. Nonetheless, the motion passed unanimously. That struck me as odd, but judging from the discussion, councillors were motivated by a desire to get on the record their recognition of the importance of local news coverage and the role that it plays in helping them do their job.

Fair enough. We agree that a healthy news media is essential to the proper functioning of democracy, and it means something for politicians to say that out loud, because they are often criticized by said media.

We should consider, however, whether the proposed cure is worse than the disease. As Joshua Benton pointed out in Nieman Lab, what happened in Australia is not all it’s cracked up to be. A bill in the Senate that aims to force the tech giants to pay royalties to Canadian journalism organizations is similarly flawed, as was eloquently explained by Sen. Paula Simons (a former Edmonton Journal colleague of both mine and McKeen’s) in a piece for The Line. It’s not clear that such a use of Canada’s copyright law would work, and even if it did, it would favour the incumbents. "At what point is it actually unfair to help big companies like Postmedia and Torstar and Bell Globe Media, while making it harder for new start ups and innovative news platforms to get a start?" she wrote. "Is there a point at which we simply have to acknowledge that the era of the big legacy newspaper companies is over?" In Taproot’s view, we have indeed reached that point.

A screenshot from the June 7 meeting where city council called on the federal government “to ensure an ecosystem for a healthy news media to serve all Canadians.”

Council can take action itself

At any rate, there’s not much we can do to influence what the federal government decides to do or not do on this file. However, there is action that our municipal government could take to strengthen the health of local journalism in our city.

The City of Edmonton buys a lot of advertising. Between 2008 and 2018, it spent well over $7 million on ads in the Edmonton Journal, and council’s executive committee agreed to renew an agreement for up to $3.5 million more over three years in November of 2018. We know these figures because the contract is big enough to have to go to council for approval. That agreement ends on Dec. 31, 2021.

A substantial proportion of that amount had been for "legally required advertising" — certain notices that the Municipal Government Act used to require the City to place in the main local newspaper. The act no longer requires this, and in October of 2019, city council passed a bylaw providing "alternative methods for advertising proposed bylaws, resolutions meetings, public hearings, and other things required to be advertised by the City." Now most of that legally required advertising can appear on the City’s website instead of in paid ads in the Edmonton Journal.

While the ostensible reason for advertising in the Journal was to reach a substantial proportion of the population as required by the MGA, the actual outcome was to subsidize Postmedia — a debt-ridden, Toronto-based company that has continually cut local journalism — in a way that has been unavailable to any of its competitors. What Taproot co-founder Mack Male told executive committee in 2018 remains true today: "Paying Postmedia for legally required advertising is effectively a subsidy to a single outlet. The opportunity here is to consider whether that subsidy should be reduced and whether it could be spread across multiple outlets, especially those who will invest the money in building a brighter future for journalism right here in Edmonton."

The City no longer has to spend as much on print ads as it used to, and its current agreement expires at the end of this year. It still has to make sure as many people as possible know what it is up to. And council just passed a motion saying that healthy local media outlets are vital to democracy. So this seems like an excellent time to use that spending power in a way that accomplishes these goals. Even a fraction of what has been allocated for advertising in Postmedia would make a huge difference to local media outlets like Taproot that inform the community and are part of the connective tissue that makes a city work.

To be clear, the City wouldn’t be buying influence with such purchases. Postmedia’s journalists feel free to criticize city council and administration, and so would Taproot’s and those at any other reputable media outlet. If there were strings attached to that money, we wouldn’t take it, and I don’t see any evidence that the City has or wants such strings. Some outlets choose not to sell any advertising at all; we do, with a clear moral compass that directs us to give up revenue if it puts the integrity of our journalism at risk.

And one more thing: With so much of the City’s communications now taking place on its own website and social media channels, it seems plausible that an ever-larger proportion of the advertising budget will go to search engine marketing and social media marketing. This is the advertising world we live in now, and it is why Google and Facebook have eaten newspapers’ lunch. But if council truly believes that something should be done to support local journalism, then it shouldn’t send all of its advertising budget to the tech giants either. Spend some of it here on the local media ecosystem.

A commitment to transparency

In early 2015, Edmonton’s City Council adopted the Open City Policy, an important document that articulates the City of Edmonton’s commitment “to bring to action the Open City principles of transparency, participation, collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation.”

Yet policies don’t implement themselves, and that’s often where the heavy lifting needs to be done. For an organization as large as the City of Edmonton (with 14,000+ employees) it’s clear that writing a set of principles is a very different challenge than applying them to everyday work. Truly becoming “open by default” requires persistence. A little public pressure doesn’t hurt, either!

Edmonton Journal columnist Elise Stolte has demonstrated again and again her commitment to this work. Most recently, she shared a “win” involving the construction of the Valley Line LRT. Stolte asked the City for the non-conformance reports it files to track TransEd’s performance, but the City refused to provide them. She appealed to the City’s freedom of information co-ordinators and was again rebuffed. So she appealed to the provincial commissioner, who determined Stolte is right and the City should release the reports.

Unfortunately, she still doesn’t have the reports. Facing a leave of absence that will take her out of the city, Stolte concludes that “transparency cannot depend on individual journalists, especially now that newsrooms are smaller, and it can’t depend on this formal, legal structure with deadlines, extensions and co-ordinators.”

Stolte concludes:

“A city that shares information freely is admitting it will never have everything perfect. When it shares, it’s inviting the rest of the community to come along. It’s an act of humility that builds bridges.”

Stolte’s persistent effort on behalf of Edmontonians is incredibly important work. Others deserve recognition here as well, such as CBC Edmonton’s Janice Johnston who led the effort to have Edmonton police share the names of homicide victims.

We’re doing our part too. While live-tweeting Executive Committee on Monday, it became clear that councillors were going to move an important discussion about role clarity in Edmonton’s innovation sector to the November shareholder meeting, which is private. I tweeted my dissent to a few members of the committee.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe next day, Councillor Andrew Knack and Mayor Don Iveson agreed the discussion should be public.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOn Wednesday afternoon, Councillor Knack filed the following notice of motion:

“That EEDC work with TEC Edmonton, Health City, and other stakeholders and report back on the status of the recommendations in the YEG Innovation Compass Report. This report should specifically address opportunities to reduce overlap, clarify roles and governance, accelerate the technology economy, and better serve the municipal innovation ecosystem.”

Assuming his motion is carried at next week’s council meeting, a report will come back providing the public with more information and importantly, another opportunity to participate in the discussion.

I know I wasn’t the only one who reached out to members of council to let them know how important it is that this discussion be held publicly. And that’s the point. It’ll take the persistent effort of all of us to ensure that the City of Edmonton and City Council adhere to the principles of transparency they’ve articulated. We’ll keep at it.

Community-driven, audience-funded journalism at NASH81

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at NASH81: Refine, the annual gathering of Canada’s student journalists. This year’s event was hosted by the University of Calgary’s independent student publication The Gauntlet. Organizers put together an exciting schedule with talks on podcasting, visual storytelling, beatwriting, ethics, humour writing, freelancing, photojournalism, and much more.

I participated in a panel discussion that explored the question, is the future of journalism crowd-funded and community-driven? Joining me on the panel were Erin Millar, CEO of The Discourse, and Jeremy Klazsus, founder of The Sprawl. Our moderator was Katrina Ingram, strategic advisor at the Alberta Podcast Network and host of the Back to School Again podcast.

While there are some differences between our organizations, there are far more similarities. Each publication is pursuing an audience-pay model in which a significant proportion of revenue comes directly from members or patrons. The idea is to serve readers rather than advertisers, which the panel agreed is more likely to result in high quality journalism that is better aligned with what the community wants.

Another similarity is that content is accessible to everyone – you won’t find any paywalls here! The panel identified two key drivers behind this. The first is that for a story to have an impact, it needs to be widely consumed. Artificial barriers that get in the way of accessing content hinder our ability to make a difference in the communities we serve. The second is that supporters want our journalism to be available to those who can’t afford it and they’re happy to contribute toward making that possible.

Engagement is also critical to each of our organizations. We seek input from our community to help drive our journalism forward and to make sure we’re adding value with everything we do. The Discourse has a survey they ask members to take upon joining, The Sprawl actively solicits input via social media, and of course at Taproot we have the Story Garden. Everyone on the panel talked about the importance of listening.

We also discussed:

  • The importance of confronting inequity in journalism and how we must seek to avoid recreating legacy media’s lack of diversity
  • How the audience-pay model is built on trust which means sponsored content is a poor fit
  • That in serving our paying audience we tend not to chase the news of the day and instead practice what The Sprawl calls “slow journalism”
  • While the federal government’s funding announcement may have some positive impacts, there’s a risk it will simply prop up the legacy players rather than support badly needed innovation in Canadian media

As is the case with these sorts of discussions, there wasn’t enough time to say everything! The students in attendance asked great questions and I hope they found our approach to the future of journalism informative and inspiring.

For more on the topics we discussed, read “The rise of audience-funded journalism in Canada“, a report published by The Discourse in December 2018 with contributions from The Sprawl, Taproot Edmonton, and other digital independent news outlets across the country.

The City of Edmonton has an opportunity to support new approaches to local journalism

On Nov. 13, City Council’s Executive Committee approved a recommendation from Administration to renew its agreement with Postmedia "for the provision of print and online advertising services for a three-year period ending December 31, 2021, for an amount not to exceed $3.5 million, including GST."

In 2012, Executive Committee approved the first such three-year agreement with Postmedia. They renewed it in 2015 for another three years.

The agreement provides the City of Edmonton with discounted rates for both legally required advertising (such as notices about bylaws, resolutions, public hearings, etc.) and other types of advertising. "For over 20 years, the City has purchased legally required advertising exclusively from the Edmonton Journal," reads the latest report.

The Edmonton Journal was selected in part for its reach but also because until recently, the Municipal Government Act specified that legally required advertisements be published in the newspaper. Amendments to the Act now in effect enable municipalities to pass a bylaw to "use one or more other methods" for such advertising, including "electronic advertising such as advertising on the municipal website."

I spoke about this at Executive Committee on Tuesday, to offer context and to share my thoughts on the proposed agreement. There was broad agreement from the Councillors in attendance that times have changed and that new alternatives should be explored. Administration also recognizes the potential for a different approach and has struck a cross-departmental sub-working group to develop a bylaw to take advantage of the recent MGA amendments. "As the approval and implementation of the updated bylaw proceeds, it is likely that the City will transition to digital advertising and will decrease reliance on newspaper advertisements as pre-authorized through this report," the report said.

Since 2008, the City of Edmonton has spent well over $7 million on advertising in the Edmonton Journal, an increasing percentage of which is for legally required advertising (72% this year). Given the declining print reach of the Edmonton Journal, and the City of Edmonton’s own substantial digital reach, this spending is effectively a subsidy to a single outlet.

With recent legislative changes, the City has an opportunity to instead invest some of that money in outlets like Taproot that are building a brighter future for journalism right here in Edmonton.

While the City is renewing its agreement with Postmedia for now, Administration anticipates returning to Council by Q3 2019 with a proposed bylaw to open the door to alternatives.

Taproot will continue to provide updates on this story in our Council and Media roundups. Read the latest editions and sign up to get them delivered to your inbox.

Here are my remarks in full:

Mayor Iveson, members of Council, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

I’m here to ask you to reconsider moving forward with the status quo represented by this agreement.

A couple of years ago I started Taproot Edmonton with Karen Unland to do something about the decline in local media here and around the country.

I’m sure you’ve heard a little about what ails the media, but let me share some clear numbers with you.

More than 250 news outlets across Canada have closed in the last 10 years, and more than 16,000 jobs have been lost in the media sector since 2008. Here in Edmonton we’ve witnessed our share of closures and job losses in that time, including the three dozen people were laid off when Postmedia merged the Sun and Journal newsrooms in January 2016, and the subsequent rounds (yes, that’s plural) of buyouts and layoffs, most recently in August 2018. And that’s just at Postmedia. You need only attend a news conference or two in the city to see how few journalists are actually covering day-to-day news anymore.

Yes, the traditional media’s loss of advertising is a big part of the reason this has happened. Online advertising will account for more than half of all ad sales in the United States this year, surpassing $100 billion for the first time, with Google and Facebook account for nearly 70% of that. The story is similar here in Canada.

Advertising dollars have shifted to the tech giants because their platforms are the most effective way to advertise online. The ability to specifically target and measure is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Despite this, the City of Edmonton spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on advertising with local media outlets like Postmedia, as well as television and radio stations.

In the 1950s, more newspapers were sold in Canada than there were households. Today, fewer than one in five households pays for newspapers.

This is not due to a lack of interest in the news. The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage said in its report published in June 2017 that "a majority of people want more local news and more coverage of their issues and their community."

It’s because attention has shifted online. Especially when it comes to global issues, never before has there been such a large and diverse number of news and information sources available to us. Locally though, the picture is not so rosy. According to the Public Policy Forum’s Shattered Mirror report, "the incumbent news media are weighed down by both their cost structures and cultures of speaking at the public. It will not be enough to preserve the old forms of civic-function journalism…news journalism will have to evolve."

I’m pleased to see in the report that Administration plans to look at alternative options for legal advertising. The newspaper has not reached "substantially all residents" as required by the MGA in quite some time. Taproot would love to be part of a discussion on how we can more effectively use technology to get the right information to the right Edmontonians at the right time.

I could talk to you about leveling the playing field and how this agreement and others like it are subsidizing my competitors. But it’s actually worse than that. Instead of propping up local reporting, this agreement will serve to funnel additional local money out of Edmonton and into the pockets of executives in eastern Canada and the American hedge funds that own their debt.

Postmedia owes its creditors more than $280 million, all of which is due by the summer of 2023. That’s why they’ve continued to make cuts and close newspapers across the country. It’s especially appalling that these cuts have come as Postmedia’s top executives have continued to receive pay raises, with a 33% increase in 2017 alone. All this while the quality and quantity of product they put out has continued to decline, despite the efforts of some talented and dedicated local journalists. CEO Paul Godfrey, who makes $1.7 million per year, said in February 2017 that his papers aren’t as good as in the past but added “they haven’t become unacceptable.”

A recent report from the Public Policy Forum called Mind the Gaps suggested government shouldn’t bail out the news industry, but instead should ensure "democracy is well-served by having a robust means of specifically informing citizens of civic activities in their communities."

It is in that spirit that I ask you to consider not approving this agreement. The status quo it represents neither reaches a substantial number of Edmontonians nor uses taxpayer dollars effectively or locally. There’s no need to wait until Q3 2019 to have a positive impact with a different approach. Paying Postmedia for legally required advertising is effectively a subsidy to a single outlet. The opportunity here is to consider whether that subsidy should be reduced and whether it could be spread across multiple outlets, especially those who will invest the money in building a brighter future for journalism right here in Edmonton.

Thank you.

Help us do better beat reporting in Edmonton

Two weeks ago we published our latest story, a look at EEDC’s proposed Innovation Hub. Written by Eliza Barlow and edited by Therese Kehler, the story was well-received and widely read. Last week, City Council voted to request that EEDC pause work on the project, pending further review and engagement.

We first shared news of the Innovation Hub in an edition of the Tech Roundup in August, not long after we began work on the story. It takes time and effort to do the quality of journalism we strive for, and we wanted to make sure it would have an impact when we published it, so we set Edmonton Startup Week as the deadline. We got lucky that innovation was on the agenda at City Council to start the week too! We followed the story up with an episode of Speaking Municipally in which Troy Pavlek and I spoke with Eliza and Therese in more depth about the story and how they did their reporting. I also live-tweeted City Council meetings on October 15 and on October 23 where the Innovation Hub and related reports were discussed. We did a follow-up in Episode 12 of Speaking Municipally, and this week’s edition of the Tech Roundup. We’ve been on the case for a while, and will continue to provide updates through the Tech Roundup and future stories as appropriate.

We didn’t stumble into the story by accident, nor did we get lucky in the timing of its publication. Both were made possible because of the attention we pay to the tech beat here in Edmonton. We launched the Tech Roundup in early June, and already it has become the must-read publication for anyone interested in Edmonton’s technology sector. Every week we curate the latest local tech headlines & happenings, and that focused attention, alongside engagement with our community, allowed us to recognize there was a potential story on the horizon. It also gave us visibility into when Edmonton Startup Week was happening and when the topic of innovation was scheduled to be discussed by City Council.

We think beat reporting, especially local beat reporting, is critical.

Having fewer reporters on beats leads to “shallower stories, and a public with a shallower understanding of important issues and institutions,” Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale told the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 2013. But in the nearly five years since that article was published things have gotten worse, not better. More than 250 Canadian news outlets have closed since 2008, and countless others have slashed the number of reporters they employ. According to the Canadian Media Guild‘s tracking of layoffs and buyouts for the past few decades, “the total is in the order of 12,000 positions lost.”

The reduction in stories being told reflects this, and it’s newsroom beats that have declined the most. According to the Public Policy Forum, the number of newspaper articles produced over the last 10 years has shrunk by almost half. Their report suggests that newsrooms may be “concentrating limited resources on covering civic affairs at the expense of other topics.”

The shrinking coverage of other topics is alarming and we’re working hard to do something about it.

Our work on the Innovation Hub story is illustrative of what we can do, even with limited resources. We’re optimistic about the future and the great local storytelling we’ll produce. But we need your help to do it. To be clear, we’re not a charity, and we’re not looking for a handout. We’re focused on delivering value to you, and we’re asking for you to invest in us so we can do even more great work. We hope you’ll join us.

Use the code INNOVATION before November 30 and save 10% on your first year of membership!