Housing Complex wins Collaboration of the Year award

We’re thrilled beyond measure to announce that Housing Complex was named the Collaboration of the Year in the small revenue tier at the 2025 LION Publishers Sustainability Awards, which were presented in St. Louis, MO, on Sept. 3.

Housing Complex, which was made possible with the help of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, was named a Collaboration of the Year at the 2025 LION Awards. (Jordon Hon)

Taproot’s series on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved about Edmonton’s housing system was the result of a collaboration with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness. ECOHH helped us secure funding from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, which made it possible for writer Eric Rice and photographer Jordon Hon to capture the stories of 12 people who play various roles in the housing system. Their careful and empathetic portraits were surrounded by explanatory pieces from Taproot’s editorial team, made up of managing editor Tim Querengesser and reporters Colin Gallant and Stephanie Swensrude; community coordinator Debbi Serafinchon organized the event we held to further engage with the themes explored in the series.

“Hands down, this is a tour de force of the power of collaboration and the power of serving your community with high-quality journalism delivered with care, respect, and depth,” one of the judges wrote. “It is deeply reported and heartfelt. One of the best examples of journalism I’ve experienced in a long time. Bravo.”

LION Publishers is an organization focused on helping local, independent, online news publications in the U.S. and Canada build more sustainable businesses. We’re proud to be among its 575+ members, and it means a lot to be recognized in this way. Congratulations to the other 20 award winners, including our fellow Canadians at La Converse, which won the Community Engagement Award in the small-revenue tier for a video series with residents of under-served communities in Montreal.

Next up is the 2025 municipal election

In some ways, Housing Complex set the table for our 2025 municipal election project, which we are now in the thick of. Many of the issues raised in our award-winning series came up in the 800+ responses to our election question, but of course, many other issues were raised as well.

Taking inspiration from those responses — as well as the further insights gathered at listening sessions, input from our election partners, and our own observations of what Edmonton’s next city council will face — we have put together a 30-question survey for candidates for mayor and city council. Those who have declared their intention to run will receive it soon, and we’ll make sure everyone who is running has the opportunity to respond shortly after nominations close on Sept. 22.

That same week, we will launch our voter matching engine, which will enable you to take the same survey to see how the candidates align with you on the issues that matter most to you. Thousands of Edmontonians used the tool in 2021, and we expect tens of thousands to do the same this time around.

Our journalists have already started digging into various election issues, often drawing on results of our listening work.

We are also excited to partner with the Edmonton Public Library on a mayoral forum, to be held at the Stanley A. Milner branch and online on the evening of Oct. 9. Register to attend, and watch the Taproot Edmonton Calendar for other opportunities to inform yourself ahead of the Oct. 20 election.

Housing Complex a finalist for Collaboration of the Year

We’re proud to announce that Housing Complex — Taproot’s series on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved about Edmonton’s housing system — has been named a finalist in the Collaboration of the Year category at the 2025 LION Publishers Sustainability Awards.

UPDATE: We won the award! Read more about that here.

Housing Complex, which was made possible through a collaboration with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, is in the running for Collaboration of the Year at the upcoming LION Awards.

This series would not have been possible without the help of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, nor would this nomination. The Collaboration of the Year award recognizes a local, independent, online news publisher that has “successfully formed a short-term or long-term collaboration with at least one other organization to positively affect their journalistic impact, financial health, and/or operational resilience.”

Partnering with ECOHH allowed Taproot to access funding from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, making it possible to assign writer Eric Rice and photographer Jordon Hon to capture the stories of 12 people who play various roles in the housing system. Those portraits became the heart of a multi-part series surrounded by explanatory work from Taproot’s editorial team.

We also worked with ECOHH to secure more funds for a well-attended and interactive event to help people further engage with the topic. We are endlessly grateful to ECOHH’s Jim Gurnett for helping us find a way to pursue this project, which would otherwise have been beyond our means. And we are indebted to Eric for not only conducting these interviews with immense empathy and care, but also laying the groundwork to make this collaboration possible.

The awards will be presented on Sept. 3 in St. Louis, MO, during the Independent News Sustainability Summit. Many thanks to LION Publishers for this recognition, and good luck to all of the finalists. Your work is immensely inspiring.

Election brings opportunity for more collaboration

When we embarked on the project that became Housing Complex, we expected housing to be a key election issue, and that assumption has been borne out by the responses so far to our election question: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?. The answers to this question will inform the survey we’ll be sending to candidates later this summer, and that will form the basis of the voter matching engine that we’ll make available to everyone in the fall. So if you haven’t weighed in yet on the question, please do — the more people we hear from, the better.

We’re happy to have the participation of several election partners to help us increase the breadth and depth of this work. They are using their channels to spread the question, and they’ll continue to engage their communities leading up to the Oct. 20 vote. If you belong to an organization that should be involved, get in touch.

LION names Taproot a finalist for resilience award

We’re honoured to be among the independent news organizations nominated for this year’s LION Local Journalism Awards!

A team meeting from May 2023, with (clockwise from top left) reporter Colin Gallant, editor-in-chief Karen Unland, publisher Mack Male, reporters Shayne Giles and Nathan Fung, and editorial assistant Ashley Lavallee-Koenig.

Taproot Edmonton finds itself in the excellent company of The Appeal, Dallas Free Press, and Santa Cruz Local in the operational resilience category, which recognizes outlets for “establishing processes, policies, and a company culture designed to support staff and manage growth in order to prevent burnout among the very people whose talent and buy-in are critical to their success.”

We’ve done a ton of work over the past year to make Taproot a healthy and supportive workplace. It’s hard to do that while you’re building a business and publishing daily, but it’s absolutely vital to look after the people who do the work. We’ve learned some hard lessons on the way to that realization, and we’re still learning. But we’ve made progress, thanks to excellent coaching from Bene Cipolla via the GNI Startups Lab on building and managing a team as well as wise counsel from our mentors at the ThresholdImpact Venture Mentoring Service. This has led to solid practices to help everyone on our team uphold our core values: curiosity, courage, and care. When people are struggling, we lift them up. When they’re excelling, we cheer them on.

It feels great to be recognized for what we’ve developed, but honestly, the best reward is when we have our weekly team meeting and everyone enthusiastically participates in our wellness check. The practices we’ve adopted helped us onboard two interns and a Canada Summer Jobs hire, integrating them with our regular staff to form a cohesive team. A shared vocabulary for meaningfully answering the question “How are you?” and a concerted effort to listen have helped us knit people together, even though we are rarely if ever in the same room.

(By the way, we’re planning to hire soon. If you’re an experienced journalist based in Edmonton or willing to move here, and you’re looking to work for an organization that genuinely cares how you’re doing, keep an eye out for our posting.)

As is our custom, Taproot Edmonton is about to take a two-week publishing break so we can catch our breath and be strong for the rest of the year. We’ll publish The Pulse and our roundups until Aug. 18, then we’ll be off until Sept. 5. You can expect a couple of episodes of Speaking Municipally during the break, however, as city council will be back in session and our civic affairs podcast will have things to say.

If you like what Taproot is doing and would like to help us go further faster, become a member or a sponsor. And if you know someone who wants to better understand what’s going on in Edmonton, tell them about us. (It looks like we won’t be able to rely on Meta for that.) We’re building what comes next in local media, and we’re working hard to make sure it’s better and healthier than what we’re replacing.

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.

Taproot shortlisted for journalism innovation award

Here’s some happy news to share with you — Taproot Edmonton is a finalist for the CJF-Meta Journalism Project (MJP) Digital News Innovation Award!

This is an annual award that recognizes news organizations that "power journalism’s future through digital journalism." It was our coverage of the 2021 municipal election that caught the eye of the jury.

The winner will be announced at the Canadian Journalism Foundation Awards on June 7.

We are shortlisted with the CBC for its Black On the Prairies interactive series, and New Canadian Media for its collective membership model, a capacity-building project with the Canadian Association of Journalists and National NewsMedia Council.

I had the pleasure of leading the tremendous team that pulled this project off, with development by Mack Male and Meenakshi Chaudhary; data analysis by Madeleine Stout; editorial work by Emily Rendell-Watson, Jackson Spring, and Troy Pavlek; session facilitation by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips; and advice from Elise Stolte and Rob Houle.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in this project. The real reward was, of course, the knowledge that we sent thousands of Edmontonians into this election with a better understanding of what the issues were and which candidates aligned best with their values. But it’s nice to get some external validation.

Taproot Edmonton wins publishing awards

We’ve been pretty heads-down in 2022, doing the work that you’ve come to expect from us, but it’s time to look up and celebrate a couple of honours for that work.

At Digital Alberta’s 2021 Ember Awards, Taproot Edmonton was named Best Digital Publication.

Last year saw huge changes at Taproot, with the launch of The Pulse, powered by a revamped website that reflects our efforts to help our community understand itself better. We were also recognized for our People’s Agenda project, in which we asked Edmontonians what issues were important to them, put those questions to the candidates, and crafted a matching engine to help voters discover who aligned with their values best.

"It was truly gratifying to be able to have such a positive impact in such an important part of our community," co-founder Mack Male said in his acceptance speech.

It was Mack’s developer chops that made all of this possible on the technical side, assisted by intern Meenakshi Chaudhary. We also pulled on his deep knowledge of city hall on the content side, alongside tremendous efforts from editorial lead Emily Rendell-Watson, data analyst Madeleine Stout, reporter Jackson Spring, listening-sessions facilitator Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, and everyone else who helped the project succeed.

Many thanks to Digital Alberta and award sponsor Communo, and congratulations to all of the amazing people and organizations recognized for their excellence.

Taproot Edmonton was named Best Digital Publication in the 2021 Ember Awards

We were also honoured to be named Independent Publisher of the Year at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. This was on the strength of Taproot Edmonton Presents: Igniting Innovation, a six-episode podcast series hosted and produced by Emily Rendell-Watson, exploring how startups and investors have been coming together in Edmonton’s tech scene.

The work Emily did on that show laid the foundation for Taproot’s new weekly podcast, Bloom, in which Emily discusses innovation in Edmonton with co-host Faaiza Ramji. We’ll share more about this project in the coming days, but in the meantime, check out the episodes so far, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

It takes resources to make award-winning journalism, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to keep making more. If you’d like to help, become a member or a sponsor, or pass this on to a friend. Such contributions make a big difference.

Silver for our election microsite at the 2018 COPAs

The 2018 Canadian Online Publishing Awards were handed out last week and Taproot Edmonton is thrilled to share that we won Silver in the Best Interactive/Infographic Story category for our 2017 Municipal Election microsite.

Martin Seto, producer of the COPAs, said they “celebrate the people that produce content in a world where there is growing mistrust of the media and the widespread distribution of tabloid and farticle content on the internet.” This year was the 10th anniversary of the awards.

We combined open data from the City with other data that we collected to build the election microsite. Prior to Election Day, readers could use the Election Guide to find their wards, candidates, voting station, and more simply by entering their address or clicking the “Locate Me” button. On Election Night, the results dashboard provided real-time updates on every race, total voter turnout, and other interesting data points, such as the incumbents being defeated and the most supported candidates. Once the information became available, we updated the microsite with campaign finance disclosures. You can easily search the data to see all the donations that candidates received.

The microsite was built by Mack Male, with editing from Karen Unland and research by Anna McMillan.

Read more about our microsite and companion email newsletter.