Let's get started

Welcome to the first newsletter from Taproot! We're thrilled with the initial response to our new project and we consider ourselves lucky to have you along for this adventure. Our goal of regularly publishing quality "how and why" stories about Edmonton will take some time to achieve, but with your help we're confident we will.

Since announcing Taproot we have received many great questions about what we're doing and how everything is going to work. We have collected and answered those on our new FAQ page. Keep the questions coming as they help us to flesh Taproot out further. In case you missed it, Mack wrote about Taproot recently, too.

We understand that you might not be ready to join us as a paying member just yet, but we'll do our best over the next few weeks to convince you that joining Taproot is worthwhile. Our initial members are already providing us input and will be actively participating in the production of our first stories.

We think a membership-supported model is better for the kind of journalism we aspire to produce at Taproot than an advertising-supported model, which tends to create incentives for page views at all costs. We hope you'll consider joining us!

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Each newsletter we'll share a few links that we think are worth checking out. Sometimes these will be about journalism and other times they will be about Edmonton.

From Karen:

There's an interesting thread about what makes a story on Elise Stolte's Facebook page. Elise is a reporter at the Journal who approaches her work in the same kind of community-first way that Taproot aspires to.
For a laugh (and reassurance that this isn't how Taproot will treat freelancers), read Wayne Gladstone's "We're Looking for Writers to Creat Internet Content!" on McSweeney's.

From Mack:

Have you ever wondered why most Edmonton addresses end in NW but a few newer locations are in a different quadrant? Paul Blinov wrote about Edmonton's offset quadrant system in Vue Weekly last week. I think it's a good example of journalism based on curiosity.
We have been inspired by many journalism thinkers and entrepreneurs, but here's one that we were especially inspired by. Jennifer Brandel wrote last year about how questions are the new comments and suggested starting with questions the audience is asking can lead to better journalism. We agree.