Transforming Local News: The Story of Taproot, Tech, and Community with Mack Male

Transforming Local News: The Story of Taproot, Tech, and Community with Mack Male

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 176 of the Business Development Podcast. And today we're talking with the co founder of Taproot Publishing right here in Edmonton, Mack k Male. Stick with us. You're not going to want to miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world. You'll get expert business development, advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs. And business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by capital business development, capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the business development podcast. And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 176 of the business development podcast. My gosh, 176 episodes. It's an absolute pleasure and honor today to bring on for you, Mack Male. Mack is the co founder and CEO of Taproot Publishing, where he leverages his extensive background in software development to revolutionize local journalism.

With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, including a significant role as product development manager at Question Mark Computing, Mack has built robust, scalable software solutions for diverse sectors. In 2016, he launched Taproot Edmonton, a digital news outlet committed to delivering in depth quality stories about the community.

His dual passions for code and prose fuel his mission to change the world through innovative storytelling and technology. A dedicated community builder, Mack has contributed thousands of volunteer hours to numerous organizations in Edmonton. His efforts in advocating for open data and supporting local startups.

Highlight his commitment to civic engagement and technological advancement. Recognized as one of Edmonton's top 40 under 40 and one of Alberta's next 10 most influential people, Mack 's impact is widely acknowledged as he continues to bridge the gap between tech and journalism. Mack mail is not just telling Edmonton stories.

He's transforming how they are told Mack . It's an honor to have you on the show.

Mack Male: Thank you so much for having me. And what an introduction. I'm going to replay that on repeat. That's a, that's a real confidence boost right there. Thank you.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh. It's so funny. Cause I, I don't post the introductions live because my gosh, I struggle to read them and it's not that I don't struggle to read them, it's that they're so awesome.

And usually they have things in there that I just can't say properly. I have to like repeat it a couple of times cause they're a bit of tongue twisters. So it's super fun. The final version always sounds. 1000 percent better. I'm very thankful that my guests stick with me through it.

Mack Male: That's how podcasting is a bit of magic, right?

Magic of podcasting. We can sound better than it goes in the recording. I do a podcast every week. And so I know firsthand that the editor makes us sound better than we actually do.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh, dude. And you know, like, I don't know about you, but before I launched the business development podcast, I had like zero and I mean zero experience in audio production.

Man, the like learning curve to get that right. Like if you go back to the beginning, you know, episode one through like eight or 10 of the business development podcast to today. It is a completely different show. And what's super funny, Mack , is that I've actually had to learn a few different music editors along the way as well, because what I realized was the one I started with, even though it was really great, you're probably familiar with it, Hindenburg Journalist Pro.

I started there. It wasn't going to carry us to the next level. There were just things that I needed that it couldn't do. And so recently I actually learned Adobe Audition. And man, I felt like an idiot for about a week trying to figure out the whole new music editor.

Mack Male: It's powerful software. You can do so much with it.

And it's come so far. I mean, when I was in high school, my friends and I really wanted to make, you know, movies and stuff, but we were computer kids, right? And so it was a real challenge at that time to record a video and get it out. On the computer so you could edit it. And once you solved that problem, which, you know, it wasn't as simple as plugging in a cord or uploading to the cloud or whatever now, then there was the software you had to learn and remember, you know, using Adobe premiere and some of their, you know, really fancy tools at the beginning.

And yeah, quite a learning curve to get to extract the power of those things.

Kelly Kennedy: Totally. But I guess like the moral of the story here is that, my gosh, if I can figure it out, anyone can. So don't let like your fear of audio production slow you down. That's right. It is. totally doable. Yes, I'm still learning.

You know, I mean, we're like a year and a half into this show. I'm still learning all the time and you will continue to learn, but don't let like the fact that you're not completely sure how to do it because you will learn a lot along the way and your show will improve along the way. And that's how it's supposed to happen anyway.

Mack Male: I mean, also, I can't imagine we're far from being able to say, Hey, Mr. AI, chat bot or Mrs. AI, chat bot or whatever. I guess they shouldn't be gendered. Here's my recording. Turn this into an amazing podcast for me, you know?

Kelly Kennedy: Oh boy. And you know, I don't know anybody more in tune with the tech industry than you, which is why I'm super excited to have this conversation with you today.

My gosh, dude. I got introduced to Taproot, honestly, when I started this show, I had, I had very little insight into the Edmonton tech industry and not just like the tech industry, like the tech leaders that Edmonton is, it's it blows my mind every time I learn something a little bit more about what's happening right here in Edmonton, but I got introduced to Taproot Publishing Yeah, I want to say like maybe three months into this show, it's basically the only thing that I read now, which is like, it says a lot.

It says a lot for what you guys are doing and what you guys have been able to accomplish. And I want to get into that. But dude, take me back. Like, Who is Mack k Male? How did you end up on this path?

Mack Male: Well, I didn't set out to be a journalist, that's for sure. I don't know that I thought much about journalism at a young age or anything like that.

I did find out early on, I sort of discovered that I really liked technology and I really liked software and I was fortunate because my parents had computers like back at The time when not everyone had a computer like we had to actually. And so, you know, I got to play with those and experiment with them.

And, you know, I learned really early on that I thought I had bricked the thing and it wasn't, it was fine. It all turned out okay. And, you know, my dad encouraged me to continue experimenting and learning. And so I always knew from an early age that I got a lot of love out of working with technology.

Software was a thing I learned about programming and I, you know, was self taught I did study that in university eventually because I knew that's what I wanted to be, you know, doing, but I learned a lot of my own and technology is great because it's one of those things where you can, especially software, you can learn a lot on your own.

You don't have to go through. You know, med school or something like that. And and I just kind of ran with that and, you know, that led me to a career in software development and working with developers and QA testers and designers and, you know, building software, you know, both I started a company when I was in high school.

We built. Kind of little utility software. And then I worked for a big you know, multinational company. We had, you know, giant customers around the world and sort of building that scale. And that was really fun and educational. And, you know, it was just because I was in software that I was, I think, in the right place at the right time when social media took off and blogging took off and podcasting actually too.

I was a really, really early adopter, like almost day one of of podcasting. And and that was my entry point into journalism was from the digital side of things.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Well, I found it kind of funny when I was just doing my initial rundown. I love to just learn more about my guests ahead of the show and the fact that you went to school for mathematics and economics.

I just find it really funny that you've ended up in journalism. Like you should be like inventing the next rocket somewhere.

Mack Male: Well, that's my degree. I don't know how good at math I am actually. But you know, I find that now a lot, right? Folks who have a degree in one thing Doing something totally different.

And I think it's always fascinating how people's career trajectories change and they follow things that they're passionate about or that they, you know, they learn more about. You just don't know what you don't know at the beginning, right? You're on the path because you think, you know, and it's interesting and you're learning, but then you discover other things along the way.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I found really interesting when I was kind of getting into who is Mack , you're like a serial entrepreneur. You've been an entrepreneur for the last twenty five years and you're not even that old. Like. That's crazy. Like, take us back to Paramagnus developments. Yeah, I feel a little older these days than,

Mack Male: Than I used to having little kids and stuff, but no, you're right.

I mean, I, I've been trying to build companies for a long time and I remember actually my parents, you know, telling me when I was a real little kid, like, you know, kids play, you know, they'll play house or they'll play cooking or whatever. Like I was like making my own little credit cards and stuff like that on paper, right?

Like I was interested in business at an early age, but Paramagnus, I started when I was in high school. What? With a couple of friends who were older than I was, and, and brought some of that business idea to it, and I was bringing the software to it, and we just identified there was an opportunity.

It was kind of right at the height of the boom, you know, in the late 90s early 2000s, internet was taken off, people were talking about the web, and at the time you know, computers were a little more limited and and the way that you configured them actually made a difference for how fast your internet was.

And so we recognized this and we wrote a little utility called speed net and you would tweak a bunch of settings on your windows computer that would help make your internet go faster. And then we added other features later on. And, but it was crazy at that time because you could put something up on the internet, which was for the web, which was pretty new still for a lot of people.

And yeah. Folks would just fork over 25 bucks. Like, they'd buy it right away. Like, this was a thing. People would just go in there and buy software. Like, it was this, you know, really, really heady time, right? And so you know, we built a good tool, I think, but it was still pretty incredible to me that we could just put something up and people would give us money.

Like, that was a really novel thing. Amazon was only a few years old by that time, right? And then we built, you know, a few other utility software applications and and that worked out for a couple of years, and then my My friends, my co founders who are a bit older, you know, went on to careers and other things.

And so that was the first iteration of the company. And and then it kind of shut down. And then another business partner and I resurrected it again a few years later when podcasting took off. And we saw this opportunity to, Do something in the podcasting space to really make it easier. So like I said, my friends and I were always keen to make our own shows, videos or audio or whatever, radio shows, we wanted to be like radio disc jockeys, I guess, or hosts.

And you know, we were doing this, but it was really hard to turn that into something that other people could download and subscribe to. And, we were able to use our knowledge of software programming to build an early podcast hosting service. We were You know, alongside Libsyn and some of the other foundational or or initial podcast hosting services, you know, one of the ones there and that was a good learning experience for us because we did business plan competitions and learned a lot more about, you know, the business side of things, not just like build software and then something.

And so it was a really educational experience. And at some point we had an inflection point and we felt like either we needed to continue. You know, kind of pivot and try to go big because YouTube had had by that point come on and video seemed like the way things were going and Apple had taken over in the iPod podcasting world.

And we decided we're going to shut this down and we're going to go work in the real world for a while. And that's what we did. We might have got jobs and learned about business from another point of view.

Kelly Kennedy: Sure. It's still really cool that you know, you were right there in the beginning of that time, right?

Like, dude, I'm so late. I'm so late. I started the Business Development Podcast in February of 2023, and we've had so much success. Like, honestly, it's been like Unreal. But like in the grand scheme of podcasting, like we're babies, like, you know, one of my favorite podcasts is actually J like, I don't know if you follow Jim Harold at all, but he's been around since like 2008.

He's got the Paranormal podcast. I'm a bit of a nerd. I love that stuff. Yeah. But honestly, I found that show in 2015, I think before 2015. I'd never even listened to a podcast.

Mack Male: Yeah, this was, this was like 2004, 2005, like just to help paint the picture a little bit. One of the things that was really critical about our podcast hosting service is that it would transcode your Audio or your video, which we supported video as well to the specific format for your device.

Cause it was a time where like if you had a zoom or an X Box or a, or a an iPod or, you know, any of the creative labs device or any of these things, like you kind of needed a specific format in order for it to work on that device. And so we would transcode all this for people automatically because it was.

Time where you would sync a device to your computer. And that's how you got the podcast, right? Like very different than now. Like, I don't know about you, but you essentially had to download it.

Kelly Kennedy: Like we used to steal music.

Mack Male: Yeah. Yeah. It was like Napster, right? It was like the, it was like that kind of stuff.

And now you're like, it just streams everywhere you are. You're always connected. It's very, very different, but it was a good, like, you know, it was fun to be involved in podcasting at that time. Like. All the stuff was so new and this idea of updating the RSS feeds to support MP3 files. And there was this debate about like, what audio format should people standardize on?

And, you know, all that kind of stuff as a nerd, as a geek, it was like pretty fun to be to be involved in. And then it was really gratifying when people actually used. What we built, right? I mean, that was pretty cool.

Kelly Kennedy: Super cool. And it's honestly, I'm honestly honored to have this conversation with you because it's like, I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's really just been there through it all and I don't know who else I would talk to.

Like, take me back. What were, what was a podcast Originally, like what was the idea of it? Like, did it is a podcast today? What you guys hoped it would be.

Mack Male: Oh, I think it's gone so much beyond what we thought and and has really taken off. And in some ways, I guess it's kind of followed the trajectory of blogs, right?

So I think it's kind of a, a good analogy to make when blogs started, you know, the word blog comes from web log. Like people would. Post reverse chronological updates on a web page. And that was kind of like a journal and it was the separate thing that you would do. It wasn't like a normal website, but at some point the technology started to coalesce and all the news sites and all the other places that you would publish stuff adopted the same features that blogs had.

This ability to subscribe, usually comments, that kind of thing. And after a while, we stopped talking about blogs because they just became websites. They're kind of the same thing, right? Podcasts were sort of similar. It was really in the early days, like, people wanting to take radio, and Bring it on to the internet and podcasting was a mechanism to let us do that.

I remember when we were building our business and doing these business plan competitions, we, we, we came up with this one chart that was pretty important and it was sort of like quadrants, right? And it was real time versus time shifted and, you know, text versus audio. And podcast was the first time that you could get time shifted audio or video, which means that like, you didn't have to be connected at the same time.

Before that, we thought about radio. You had to be have your radio turned on the same time you were broadcasting, right? The same with pretty close with, you know, television and other things, right? So, or you were at the mercy of someone else's schedule, at least. And podcast was empowering because it let you do this time shifted thing.

And that was really novel. That was really new. And so, you know, I think at the beginning, it was like people wanting to take radio shows, put them on the internet. Make it so that you could listen whenever you wanted to, you know, Steve Jobs would, would talk about how it was a possible way to fill up this, you know, giant device that you have in your pocket.

It has all the space. We're going to put on their, you know, podcast and one of the things you're going to put on there. And I think over time it's evolved and changed where now it's kind of like blogs. We don't, we still kind of talk about podcasts as a separate thing because you can, you know, have a subscriptions, but Spotify is a good example.

It's just yeah. Part of this app that you use to access audio, right? It's less of a separate thing. You go and you're like, Oh, I'm going to podcast now. Like I'll listen to music and then podcast and I'll flip between them. And it's all just audio that comes to me now. Right.

I think

Kelly Kennedy: it is. And you look at like, you look at like audio platforms, like, you know, whether you listen to audible or whether you listen to, like you said, Spotify, every single one of them has now incorporated podcasts.

It's like, If your audio software does not have the ability to listen to podcasts, you are not going to make it like that's it's become that important. It's crazy.

Mack Male: And I think that the best sort of underlining all of this is the recent news right that Google shutting down Google podcasts, which isn't particularly surprising Google shut stuff down all the time, but more that the replacement is just YouTube.

Like podcasts to Google are just another thing that's available on YouTube. Like that's pretty incredible. I don't think anybody would have foreseen that, you know, in 2005 when YouTube was starting to take off and podcasts were really brand new. Like they seemed like totally separate worlds. Right. And now you know, the fact that podcasts are just part of the YouTube experience, I think illustrates how normal that is.

It's become, you know, the stats about how many people listen to a podcast in any given month. They're a lot less interesting than they used to be because lots of people do, even if it's a radio show, like a traditional radio show that's in podcast form, right?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. I think I would be more surprised now if somebody told me they didn't listen to podcasts.

Mack Male: Yeah. Yeah. I think so too.

Kelly Kennedy: Which is, it's wild, right? Like I, I look at like my entry into the podcasting space. And when I launched this show, you know, I think I remember just talking to my Walnut and thinking like, Man, who in the world is going to listen to this? Like it's just Kelly Kennedy talking about business development, right?

Like at that time, that was the plan. I was like, I'm going to educate the world. I'm going to inspire them and pump some people up to do some business development. That's the goal here. And it's obviously changed into something considerably bigger than that. Now we educate and inspire the world. We shine big, bright spotlights and entrepreneurs and specifically Canadian entrepreneurs, because we love to spend some time with them.

But you know, we're worldwide. We bring in people from all around the world and. And it's just, it's this like amazing connection device. Like that's really what podcasts are. They're just this like. This amazing tool to connect the world together to share ideas like in a lot of ways, they're just like the Internet.

Mack Male: Yeah, and we don't get all the headlines, you and I, but we are in the majority, right? So the Joe Rogans of the world with millions and millions and millions of listeners and hundreds of millions of dollars and, you know, contractor deals and stuff like that, like they're not the majority in podcasting, right?

There's far more, you know, impactful. Cool. Connecting podcasts that have their communities that, you know, build connections with other communities and, and do that on a regular basis because maybe there, it's just a passion thing, or maybe, you know, like you've been able to, it sort of supports your business goals and, and, and that's a part of it too.

Right? So that's, that's what I think about when I think about podcasting, I think about all the people that are, you know, using this amazing tool to, as you say, sort of inform people, connect people meet people, all of that. Not the sort of big name celebrities that, you know, get a lot of the headlines for, for podcasts.

I mean, that's another thing nobody would have predicted, I think, when it started. That somebody would get 250 million or whatever for a podcast show.

Kelly Kennedy: Crazy. Like, unreal. Yeah, and I think Joe Rogan just signed another agreement for, you know, a number of years for even more than his first deal.

Mack Male: Yeah.

Probably right. I mean, the numbers that finally came out about Spotify's downloads kind of reinforce why, right? I mean, he's kind of in a class of his own in terms of audience, but.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, and you know, when you were talking about Google, it's like, I don't know about you, but like, I think the Google listens that we have on our show versus the Spotify listens, it's like.

5 percent of the Spotify listens. Like they just weren't winning that fight.

Mack Male: Yeah, no, for sure. It's Apple and then Spotify, right? That's where, where all the listenership comes from.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, it's, it is. I'll be honest for me, it's Spotify and then Apple. That's, it's kind of been that way on my show. Not really sure why it ended up that way, but we definitely have like probably, I would say at least 75 to 80 percent of our listens are straight through Spotify with the remaining being, yeah, through Apple.

Mack Male: Cool.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, it is. It's, it's weird though, but yeah, it's like trying to figure out. And, you know, we can talk about this later, but trying to figure out how to advertise your show and grow your show too is a bit of a nightmare, especially with the amount of stuff going on. Like we finally just stopped. We're like, we're just going to spend on Spotify.

Like we know it's authentic, real people. We know we're not going to get scammed on Spotify, right? But it's crazy. Like the, the amount of like service industries trying to like pump your show or reaching out to you on a weekly basis. If you have a show is absolutely bonkers.

Mack Male: Yeah, no, there's a huge cottage industry of that kind of stuff because people have this idea.

I'm going to do a show and I'm going to grow it or whatever. And then they find out it's hard. It's actually a lot of work. It takes a lot of, you know, focus and consistent effort. And, you know, people like a quick win or a magic bullet or whatever the analogy is. And so these places offer that, but yeah, I don't think you're going to get a lot of mileage out of those.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, I don't know about you, but nothing in business, podcasting, anything I've ever done has happened as in as short a time as I'd hoped for, like, it's almost always at least 50 percent more time. So, you know, nothing's going to happen without consistency and effort.

Mack Male: That's right. And I feel like my background in software really prepared me for this reality of business, right?

Because in software, this is the thing. It's always. You know, it always takes longer than you think, right? Developers are notorious for having really optimistic estimates for how long something's going to take, and, you know, project managers and higher ups will intelligently budget, well, it's going to take 30 percent longer, I'm just guaranteed, like, there's no way.

So yeah, then you get into the business world, and, and you're right, things take longer than you hope they will. It's also one of those things where, like, on the longer scale, you do more than you think, and on the shorter scale, you do less than you think, right? It's, it's one of those, you know, one of those things.

Kelly Kennedy: I would agree. I would agree. It's like if I look at where I was at, you know, even a year ago to today, I could not have imagined the things that would have happened. But I think when I got started, I was very, very like, why is this not happening faster? Why is this not growing quicker? Why don't we have more downloads?

Why don't we have more offers or orders or whatever? Like, You know, I mean, in the short, you're always like, why is this not happening fast enough? But in reflection, and you look back a year and you're like, holy crap, we've come a long way in a year, right? Yeah. And I totally think you're right. I think we're really crappy at estimating time in the short term, and we underestimate our power in the long term.

Mack Male: Yeah, lots of way smarter people than me have made this case, and I've just considered myself fortunate to learn it repeatedly, I guess, along the way, but, you know, you hear it in families and parenting a lot. The days are long, but the years are short. I think that's really super true. And it's kind of similar to what we're talking about on business.

And then, you know, I don't know if you've read the book Atomic Habits. It's Pretty popular now, James Clear, like his book is kind of all of all about that, right, that it's the systems and the processes and the habits that you build, the things you do over time that lead to those incredible results. And it might seem slow at first, but they sort of accelerate and it's exponential.

And that's just really been my experience as we found at Taproot too. If we do things consistently over time, usually not always, but usually it pays off, right?

Kelly Kennedy: My entire business has been based upon viewing the same things that people don't want to do repeatedly. But if you do them repeatedly and consistently, you get results like it's almost inevitable.

If you do like effective process over time consistently, it's almost impossible to fail, but most people are not consistent. That's the problem.

Mack Male: That's right. Yeah. Or it's, they don't have systems to be consistent or, you know, it's, it's difficult to figure out how to make that happen. Right. But you're right.

If you're, if you are stick, if you can find a way to be consistent, you can find a way to stick with it, find a way to muster the energy to come and do that thing again. It can pay off for sure.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. And, you know, we talked about, you know, the power of a community of a podcast, but let's talk about the power of taproot about that community.

Like, like you have basically taken over. Tech reporting in in Alberta, period, like how the hell did you do that?

Mack Male: Consistently doing things every week repeatedly and trying to focus on good quality product? You know, as you, as you know, I've been involved in Edmonton's tech community for a really long time, and, you know, I'm fortunate.

I've got to learn and meet Learn from and meet a lot of really great people in that community. And demo camp is a pretty amazing event that has been part of our community for a long time. And it was at demo camp where, you know, I was writing about demo camp on my blog. I was a blogger still. And I'd, after every one, I'd say, here are the demos we had.

Here's what I think about them. Here's what else was announced. And it became this thing where, you know, demo camp is a pretty important event for the tech community. And my blog is. Kind of the only record of a lot of those events, actually, and people would look forward to the write up of it after. And so I was doing that, and, you know, a few folks at Democamp were like, You know what?

Like, you should do a newsletter. Why don't you do, like, a tech newsletter? And, you know, we had started Taproot by, by that point, but we had this idea to do What we call roundups. These are our weekly newsletters where we round up everything that's happening on a particular topic or a particular beat. And tech was one of the first ones we did just because of the knowledge I had there and the connections I had there.

And it's totally one of those things. If you do it. Every week for what are we at five years now, or six years of the tech roundup, it really does accumulate. It becomes known as the place where you can go reliably go and find this information. Yeah, it's really important to us to be trustworthy. So we put a lot of effort into being.

You know, accurate and high quality and all of that. But you know, that's part of it. It's the it's the consistency that is a really significant part of it as well. And so over time, the tech roundup has become like a must read publication for the tech community in Edmonton, and it's happened alongside.

The continued decline in traditional media or mainstream media, right? So they've continued to be, there's continued to be layoffs and closures, and there's just fewer people at those organizations than there once was. And so one of the big gaps that my co founder Karen Unland and I identified early on was that people weren't talking about tech in, in Edmonton or innovation really in Edmonton, even though this is this growing thing.

And we talk a lot about economic development and how can we. Diversify the economy and all of that, like it was undercovered and underreported. And so it was an opportunity for us to try to do something about that. And tech roundup was our entry point into that.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. And now what do you got? You got the regional roundup, you have the tech roundup, you have the business roundup, like, dude, I checked them all.

Like I, I'm a huge advocate for what you're doing. Like, honestly. And, like, it's weird because you would think that most people would default to checking CBC or CTV or something like that. I don't check those, dude. I check Taproot. Like, if I want to know what's going on in Edmonton. All I got to do is check Taproot because you guys do a better job at it.

Mack Male: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. And we're gratified by those kinds of comments. People who say, like, our weekday newsletter, the one that comes out every weekday, is called The Pulse. You know, lots of folks will tell us, well, The Pulse is how I start my day. Or, I get, you know, five or six or seven or ten newsletters, but I only read, really, two of them consistently and reliably, and The Pulse is one of them.

And that's just really, you know, gratifying for our team to hear. It reinforces why we're trying to do all the work That we're doing. We started the pulse, for example, that, that newsletter, because we wanted it for ourselves, I wanted a newsletter. I could wake up every morning and see like what's going on in Edmonton.

And it didn't exist. There wasn't a place where I could find that. And so we set out to build it. And, and again. You do that repeatedly, and, you know, it builds, it builds an audience. It builds a community. People like it. They tell their friends, they tell other people, you know, I think a lot of people still do default to mainstream news.

You know, there's a generation of folks who for sure just leave the TV on all the time and whatever's on global or CTV is what they see for local news. But news habits are so diverse now, right? People consume news in a whole bunch of different ways. You know, I have family who just, The way they watch local news is they go to YouTube and then there's some clips on YouTube about local news and for other folks that social media and for our audience, a big chunk of our community.

It's email. They spend all their time in their email anyway. This is a great way for them to access news. I think probably the most interesting thing recently is that. Big competition for us is actually news avoidance. I think the number of people that just try to avoid news altogether and don't want to read it is growing, right?

And so that's a bit concerning, but for folks who do want to know, like, what's happening in the community, I think Taproot has become a pretty effective way for them to do that.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, and I would argue that if you're going to do news avoidance, it's mainstream news you need to avoid. It is not independent news media like Taproot at all.

Like the stuff you guys are reporting on is typically the amazing things happening in our community. You're like the opposite of mainstream news. You're like the positivity bringers instead of the negativity bringers.

Mack Male: Well, some of that's intentional and some of that's accidental, right? So, the intentional bits are, we, we don't like this idea of a, of it bleeds, it leads.

Like, we don't do crime coverage or anything like that usually. I mean, if we do crime, it's at an aggregate level. It's like, what can we as a community learn about this trend? But not, here's the latest murder, here's the latest court case or anything like that. And those are important still. Like, you know, there, there, there is a need for that kind of Reporting to happen for over time, the community to learn and understand you know, that aspect of it better, but there's people who are already doing that.

And so that's the sort of unintentional aspect of it, which is that we kind of tried to find the gaps, like what is not getting covered anymore? What is not getting covered as well? And let's lean into that rather than trying to duplicate what post media or CBC or somebody else is doing. Where can we add value?

That's a bit different as we've grown. And as they've shrunk. I think there's more overlap now I would put our city council coverage up against any other coverage in the city. I think it's phenomenal. And that's an area where we do things that other people do as well. But even there, like there's so much that we could be saying or, or reporting on and, and helping people understand better that like, I feel like we're still only sort of scratching the surface of, of what we could do for the community if we were, you know, if we had the resources essentially.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Well, and that was kind of one of the questions that I was going to have for you because. The reporting that you guys do is extremely well researched, extremely well done, extremely diverse, and you're like, in my mind, like, how are you able to do that without all that government funding that the big news outlets are getting?

Like, I would argue that your research, your articles, the amount of stories that you guys do, Man, it's actually unbelievable that you're able to do it as an independent agency. What is it like to operate as an independent agency? Let's talk about that.

Mack Male: It's challenging, as you would expect. I mean, getting anything off the ground, any kind of business, you know, up and running and trying to find the Customer base is, is challenging and in news, it's just even more challenging because as you say, we're, we're not funded in the same way that lots of other organizations are.

We do get a very, very small amount of government grants from mainly the federal government actually, but you know, the local government, for example, in Edmonton has a hundred thousand dollar contracts or more with all the other news outlets. And, you know, we haven't been able to break into that yet.

We're not opposed to, to to, to government funding, but. It's you know, in media, it's a challenging topic. Some organizations feel like there's just no way you can take any money from the folks you're meant to cover. We've always had a more nuanced view on, on that. It's similar to, you know, we cover business, but some of those businesses are our customers.

And, you know, what all of that comes back to you, how are we able to do all of that? How are we able to do the quality is, is that commitment to trust? And we know that if we don't get it right if it's not good quality if it's not new, true and interesting people aren't going to trust us and all of the things we want to do really rely on building that trustworthy relationship.

And you know, we've tried to set our business up so that it reinforces that we don't sell ads on our website. Which means we're not trying to drive tons of page views, which means we're not led down the sort of listicle story idea or, or, you know, the thing that drives traffic, but doesn't really inform people.

We're all about informing and connecting people, and we've tried to build the business in such a way that the incentives are aligned with that, you know, the journalism that we do is really about informing our audience. being responsive to the curiosity that they have, you know, maybe connecting them to each other or to other things in the community and to find another way to fund that, to find another way to bring in revenue to help us do that so that we can kind of have that, that impact.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, it's no secret that, you know, all the major news agencies are taking massive, massive payouts from the government in order to function, right? Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's possible anymore to function without somebody paying some of those bills. Like, unless the government is essentially bankrolling the entire news and then saying, we're going to, you guys still be completely impartial, but we're going to pay for this whole thing.

And you and me both know that that's not what's happening or like that that's not how that's going to go. Right. They're going to want their back scratched for whatever funds they're willing to give to the major news outlets. So I don't think it's like reason if anybody thinks that news is completely impartial anymore, or, or that there isn't some money influence happening, they're just they're putting their head in the sand.

Mack Male: Yeah, we've always said that we don't believe in objectivity for Taproot. That's pretty central to our, our worldview. We believe everybody has a bias, and we think it's better to be upfront and transparent about the bias rather than pretend to be objective or biased. Try to do your journalism as Jay Rosen says, you know, using the view from nowhere.

That's not a thing that we do, right? So we don't try to do this both sides ism where we give equal time to two sides, you know, under the false assumption that there's always two sides to every story. Like, that's just not true all the time. And so, you know, we don't try to be right. Perfectly objective. We try to be factual.

We try to be trustworthy. We try to be upfront and transparent with readers so they they can decide for themselves, you know, if this is information that they can they can trust or not. Just quickly back to the government funding thing. I'm actually not opposed to the government completely funding. You know the publication, the production of news in a, in a country like Canada.

So for example, if you completely funded CBC, but said you guys no longer sell ads, you know, you're not a business you're funded by the government. You're going to do news gathering and reporting all across this. Really vast territory that so few other countries have to deal with, and then that content is creative commons.

It's available. Other news publications can republish it freely. I think that would be actually a really good use of our tax dollars, and it would allow organizations like Taproot and others to continue to do additional journalism beyond that and try to build a business around it. But we would sort of have that baseline, you know, a bit of reporting that happens everywhere and that is You know, publicly funded and, and it kind of removes some of the need to do that, that back scratching that you talked about, right?

So, I mean, I know that in the next federal election, there's going to be a lot of talk about CBC and, and what happens depending on, on who wins. And so that'll be very interesting to see, but I could see that a change to the model could actually be a good thing for journalism in this country.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, and I actually agree with you completely.

News is a public, a mandatory public service, period, and on some level, and even though like, yeah, like I grew up in capitalism, I believe in free market, but I also believe that there are certain things that probably shouldn't be capitalist or shouldn't be free market. There are things that as humans, we need, we need food, we need shelter, we definitely need to know what the hell is going on.

Mack Male: Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: And so I think on a certain level, there are some things that. Governments handling it, as long as they handled it well, would be welcomed.

Mack Male: That shared set of facts that we can all operate from is, is really, really critical, really important. And south of the border in the United States, they have a much more developed non profit and philanthropic, you know, funding.

Model, I guess you'd say our system in Canada. We don't really have that. We're way behind what they're doing down in the United States. So, you know, taproot started as a for profit. We're a for profit company and that was intentional, right? We decided like if if we could do a good job at this, if we can achieve our mission of informing and connecting people, we should be able to do.

Make some money to do that. Not thinking we're going to get rich off this. I don't think journalism is an industry you should go into if you want to be rich. But, you know, just enough to be able to pay people well to make sure that there are people who continue to have a job in journalism who could do this important work.

You know, we didn't want to be limited by, you know, You know, the the nonprofit or charitable approach that some other independent news sites have taken, and it'll work for some of them. And that's great. And I think we need this mix of things, right? But for taproot, you know, we felt like there was an opportunity to go about it in a slightly different way.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And I think More is better. I like I really think that the more news outlets that we have to work from and get that information from the better because at least then there's a little bit of competition. There's a little bit of diversity. You get more than one opinion and perspective.

And I think perspective is everything, especially in news. Usually if I'm reading something that's important to me, I'd like to hear a couple different views on it, not just CTV or CBC.

Yeah, that triangulation of, of the facts and of the information and everybody sees it from a slightly different point of view and they bring, as we talked about, different biases to it.

Mack Male: I think that's important. And I'm, I'm hopeful that that'll actually be a thing that helps the AI overlords in the future, right? Instead of just regurgitating one single answer, they can, you know, bring together a diverse range of, of Yeah. Reporting or, or views on it and then synthesize that together, I think would be pretty helpful.

I would possibly be a, you know a net good for humanity. If we went along those lines, we'll see if it plays out that way. I don't know.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, as long as it doesn't play out like Terminator two, I don't know. I'll feel better about it, but honestly, I'm a huge advocate for AI. I think AI. At this point, the genie's out of the bottle.

It doesn't matter what you thought about it. It's like, it's like nuclear weapons. Yeah, we don't like nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy has been all right. But once it's out of the bottle, it's out of the bottle. You can't put it back. You can't pretend that AI isn't going to be a thing. So we need to figure out how to embrace it and use it for good, use it for ethical good, for business good, for however good we can use it for.

You're not going to put that invention back in the minds of the people that invented it.

Mack Male: Yeah, I think that's right.

We've started using it at Taproot you know, more in a behind the scenes kind of way or in the backroom, how the sausage is made kind of way. So as you know, from our publications, we do a lot of aggregation and curation.

We pull together stuff from other sources and we use AI to help us do that work and to help filter it and, and to summarize it for our team. And then everything we publish has. Is written by humans and has a human set of eyes edit it, and that's really important to us back to that trust and everything.

But in the process of getting to that point, you know, utilizing technology has been foundational to what we decided to do at taproot using, you know, leaning on my background in technology and the ability to build things in software and AI is just another tool that we can help that can help us do that work more efficiently or more accurately.

And, you know, we're it's early days. Right. But we're sort of exploring how that can have a real impact for us.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, and me and you both know, producing a show, right? Like there's a lot of AI that goes into the show production. And thank God, because otherwise it would take like eight hours every single time we need to produce a show.

Like it just wouldn't happen. Like not we would have to either pay out, pay out, pay a fortune for someone to do all the transcription and summaries and everything. Or we can use this amazing new technology to help us with those things. Cut that time down to, you know, one and a half, two hours. And frankly, just give me and you a weekend.

Thank God.

Mack Male: Absolutely. Or our teams, right? I remember, you know, back to the early days of podcasting. I remember very distinctly when this piece of software was released. It was, I think it was called Levelator. It was that all it did was a tool that took your audio and would. Normalize the sound of two peoples.

If you were recording an interview, which at that time was again complicated and one was quiet and one was loud, the software used this algorithm to make it sound equal so that it sounded better in the in the final cut. I mean, these are fundamental things that are easy to do now in the software, and it's far beyond that.

But I remember that being, you know, that's an example of It's kind of AI, right? There's an algorithm there. It's probably way more sophisticated now. But that was sort of like an eye opening thing to you for, Oh, wow, this technology can really help us solve some of these problems that go into, or the challenges of making this thing happen.

And if this is what we're doing in 2020 or 2004 or whatever, like imagine what it'll be 20 years from now. And that's how I feel today too. Right? It's like, this is what we're doing in 2024. Imagine what it'll be, you know, in five years, 10 years.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh, dude. And it's so funny that you talked on normalization because when I started this show, I was manually normalizing the audio to try to get it where I wanted it to be.

And now it's like two clicks. Yeah. And I have perfectly normalized audio to the exact level that I want. Like, technology is amazing and we have to embrace it. We have to. And you know, you're talking about, you're talking about AI and how we're in the infancy and I think like we could have never known when we watched, you know, and I remember watching you know, the the press conference for iPhone online and just thinking like, wow, like you put a friggin computer in the phone, like that's going to be so cool, but like not knowing what that means, not knowing the impact that that would have on the world.

And like we could have never seen. Those the supercomputers we carry in our pockets every day, everywhere we go, AI is the same like we have no idea that's the little tilly tally things that we're doing right now with AI is nothing compared to what we are going to have eight to 10 years from now,

Mack Male: I just hope as we get to those eight to 10 years that more people think about how do we do this responsibly?

How do we be. You know, really try to come at this from a point of view where it's going to assist people, assist humans and, and be a useful and empowering thing. You know, as we're recording this, the thing I've been reading about the story I've been reading about is this glue thing. I don't know if you've seen this, but, you know, Google has recently launched their AI summary.

So when you search on Google, it'll tell you. Try to summarize an answer for you at the top using AI. And somebody asked, well, you know, I make pizza and the cheese falls off. What should I do? And the AI said, you should mix in an eighth of a cup of glue. And it's based on, you know, it's based on some Reddit post that somebody made ingest years and years and years ago that has found its way into the AI.

And, you know, people haven't, it's the internet, people are having fun with it. They're making pizza with glue. They're tasting it all. This kind of really shouldn't do that, but it's kind of ridiculous. You know, that's a simple thing. It's a funny example, but what if it was something more serious, right?

What if it's a, a kid who searched for something and they got this and takes it literal, takes it literal, kind of like Tide pods. It was a trend a few years ago or whatever. And kids eating tide, whatever people are going to do that with or without AI, I guess, but, you know, as we build the AI and as we use it and as companies find ways to use it, you know, just really thinking about those Those ethics and how to do it in a safe way and how to have other things around it that that help prevent those bad outcomes, right?

And so for TAPRIT, it's that idea that we always have a human set of eyes that look at this will never publish an article that is completely written by AI and doesn't have a, you know, somebody look at it for for accuracy, let alone what You see happening in the world now, which is these sites spring up that are fake.

They don't have real reporters. There's no bylines or they're made up sometimes, and they're just producing news. That is sounds plausible because these things are really good at parroting human language. But is actually not true or is not based on any sort of facts. And that's pretty concerning. And as we head into an election year here in the United States, it's going to be even more of a, of a challenge.

And so it's a big thing to consider in our industry, but I think that's probably the case in every industry, right? As you embrace this new technology, you really got to think about what are the, what are the potential downsides to this as well? And what can we do to mitigate them? I agree with you, not say.

We should throw the baby out with the bathwater. But how do we adopt this in a responsible way?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Well, I really like what you were saying about putting humanity back into it. And I talked to that all the time on the business development podcast, because obviously we're using AI to help us with copy to help us all sorts of stuff.

Right. But if you just copy and paste that you sound like a robot, like, I'm sorry, AI does not sound human. It does not speak the way that you do. And so, yeah, are there things that you can take from that that are effective that maybe give you a better value proposition or whatever else? Absolutely. But make sure that you're putting some of you back in there that you're writing some of your own copy because otherwise, you know, I mean, you're not going to stand out.

You're just going to sound like a robot like everybody else copying copy.

Mack Male: Yeah, yeah. And in some contexts, maybe that's okay. Like, there's probably a few use cases where that's appropriate. But in other times, yeah, you've got to be Stand out. You've got to have some uniqueness. You've got to have some personality.

I think that's what allows us to connect with another human, right? Is a little bit of personality and we get to get a little window into their world. And if you take all that out, because you run it through the AI, then you miss out on that opportunity for connection.

Kelly Kennedy: And I think that that's something about Taproot that I really like.

is that I feel like I'm connected to something. I don't feel like I'm just reading the mainstream news tagline that I'm meant to read. I feel the connection to the community through Taproot. That's something you guys have done really well.

Mack Male: Well, thank you. We think it's important to highlight our community and to point to other people and to, you know, recognize the work that they're doing.

And so we do a lot of that. A lot of our stories and a lot of our headlines and things we write are just pointing to what other people are doing and trying to bring some context to it and trying to help people make sense of it a little bit better. But but ultimately, like promoting and you. Maybe not promoting, but, you know, again, trying to highlight what other folks are doing because we feel like our community is so rich and so vibrant, and there's so many amazing things happening.

And if only folks knew a little bit more about all of those amazing things, like, what would that turn into? Right? And so we try to bring a little bit of that. We ask hard questions to and we follow up and we try to make sure we follow threads. And that's part of helping people understand the community better.

But our starting point is not it. We want to tear something down. It is how can we build right? How can we help and contribute to this community?

Kelly Kennedy: Well, and I think it's because of resources like taproot that we have the fastest growing tech sector in the world. It's because we like Edmonton business community is amazing.

Like I am, I am so grateful to be here and to be able to meet so many entrepreneurs. And I've had a lot of them on the show and I've had people reach out and say, Kelly, you know, you can have people from all around the world on the show. And I do. But I focus a lot on Edmonton, but it's not just because I live here.

It's because the people in Edmonton, the work we're doing here is world changing. They are going to change the world and it's going to happen right here in our backyard.

Mack Male: And it's been happening for a long time, right? Longer than people think. I mean, nowadays we talk a lot about our artificial intelligence and Amii and the amazing researchers we have there.

And that's all true, but you know, we've had AI researchers doing incredible things in that space for a couple of decades now, if not longer. You know, the games group at the University of Alberta is renowned for for its work and chess and checkers and poker and all kinds of things that were sort of foundational to this current wave of of A. I. But, you know, health innovation and and some of the advances that have been made in, you know, islet cell transplants and all those kinds of things that came from Edmonton, you know, and then there's the more obvious sectors that people associate us with, you know, energy and things like that. And again, Edmonton is an early Leader in the hydrogen space and maybe remains to be seen how that's going to play out.

But, but we do have a lot of the, you know, the ingredients here that is are needed to help kind of take a lead on these things. And, you know, we cover City Hall a lot. I think even there we've been a leader in lots of different ways and have been recognized. Both on the tech side of things with open data, which you mentioned, and you know, some of the adoption of of, of Wi Fi and I. T. Systems and things for people like that's common now. But Edmonton was a leader in a lot of those things and really took the lead in Canada for sure. Anyway, and said, Here's how we could use this to help improve our community. And when you do that, You, you earn the accolades from elsewhere, right? So instead of starting from we want to go out and win this national or global award, it's like, let's do really great things for the people that are here.

And if we, if we do a good job of that, others will recognize that. And then those accolades will come.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm incredibly proud to be Not just Canadian, but, but from here, from Edmonton. It's, it's an amazing place. And I know you are too. And that's why I know, I know the first time we chatted, I was like, I can't wait to have this interview with you, Mack .

I can't wait. You know, dude, you have your ear to the pulse of Canadian tech. You really do. You have a better eyes and ears than probably anybody else I've had on this show. And I would love to know what are some of like the amazing technologies that you've seen or that you've heard about that are coming out of Edmonton that have completely blown your mind.

Like you were just at a seminar or a conference for Amii.

Mack Male: Amii has this annual AI conference called Upper Bound and it's just wrapping up this week actually as we're recording. And we did We did an event for Taproot. Actually, we host an event where we talked about pink slime journalism and how generative AI is contributing to these new sites that, you know, are fake and make stuff up.

And that's bad for for lots of reasons. But I also was fortunate to moderate a panel on investment in Alberta and how AI is impacting that or not impacting that. And I, you know, I guess the takeaway from that panel, a couple of takeaways were that it's pretty early days still. And you know, We think that AI will continue to have a real impact on investment in, in Alberta.

But also that AI doesn't dramatically change the equation. If you're a founder, if you're an entrepreneur, you still got to have a good business. You still have to be investable. You still have to talk to your customers and really understand the problem you're solving. And, you know, AI is a way to maybe accelerate some of those things.

But just cause you say you do AI doesn't mean the investors are going to, you know, find you any more appealing. Yeah. And the other takeaway they, they mentioned is. You know, anybody can get a company started and you should think about that. It's a lot easier now than it, than it used to be. And you don't always have to be CEO.

You can be a researcher, have a good idea, start something, and then, you know, build a business and with support, you know, somebody else can take the lead on the business side of things and help you grow that thing. And also, you know, to think a little bit bigger. I think one of the things Edmonton still struggles with is being a bit too humble and, and, and not.

You know, tuning our own horn quite as much as we should, and A. I. Is maybe a good example of how this started to change, but how it remains an issue right when the rankings were out of a number of years ago, and Edmonton was number three in the world. That was the thing I heard people talk about a lot.

Like Edmonton is in the top three for research centers anywhere in the world when it comes to artificial intelligence. Like people were proud of that. I don't know that we still are. It does, it almost doesn't matter because folks still talk about how much of a hub for research and AI we are. And that's part of that, you know, that pride that we have in our community that I think we need to see more of.

So, you know, it's started to shift a little bit. But that's, that's an example of you know, how things are, you know, Changing, but maybe slower than we'd like them to, you know, I think we'd all like to be forefront and all the conversations and, and what I heard from the investors is we're not always, but that's not the way it'll always be right.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, I think I think you actually are very, very right. I think in the grand scheme of humble, we're, we're right at the top. And you know, we're very reluctant to talk about our wins or what we're doing, or how amazing this is, like, we're not like the US who would have a breakthrough and be all about that.

They'd be screaming about it, right? Like, we're incredibly humble with it. And I think it does take Organizations like Taproot, like what we're doing here at the Business Development Podcast to be able to say, no, no, no, what you're doing is freaking amazing. Yeah. And we need the world to know about it. And you know, we have a worldwide show here, which is super cool, super amazing.

And I try to shine a big bright light on Edmonton every chance I get, because I think there's a lot of people not getting the recognition they deserve.

Mack Male: Yeah, absolutely. So let me answer your question a little more directly. Some of the stuff that's pretty incredible to me. Everybody probably knows who's listening to this podcast.

The Jobber is from Edmonton. I think it's so incredible that those guys, Sam and Forrest have built and the team have built that company to where it is, and it probably will be Edmonton's first unicorn, if that's still a term we care about. You know, the Impact that it can have on small businesses all around the world, but especially in North America is just incredible.

And I remember sitting with those guys in the coffee shop in Edmonton talking about it in the early days, and they've just done such a great job of building an amazing business there. And so it's also an example of, you know, it doesn't need to be. Super sexy in order for it to be a good business and successful and to have an impact, right?

I mean, software for folks who do window cleaning and lawn care and painting and all of that doesn't sound super exciting, but it's really, really impactful. And so I'm pretty proud, obviously, that jobber is an Edmonton grown you know, company coming from here. We get to write about a lot of these companies that taproot.

You know, there's some that really blow my mind, like zero point cryogenics is one and the work they're doing around it. Quantum computing or sort of the inputs into what could help make quantum computing a thing are pretty impressive and way beyond my level of understanding, but so cool that there's folks in Edmonton who are doing that kind of thing.

And in a similar way, you know, future fields is starting to become more well known with their approach to, you know, using fruit flies to produce the ingredients for, you know, some of these you know, bioproducts. And they started in cellular ag and now they're moving more into. to pharMack euticals and things like that.

And it's, it's such an important part of that process that, that creation of drugs and things like that. And, and that's what we're going to accelerate in the future. And so for an Edmonton company to be, you know, producing things that are so foundational to that and to really have an impact in that, In that space, I think is really cool.

I mean, those are the those are the kinds of things that I think about all the time, right? It's like, I can't believe this company is from Edmonton. And you know, these folks just started here and I get to interview some of them from time to time. And you know, I do less of that now than I used to. And I'm always wondering, like, what is it about Edmonton that either made it hard or easy for you to do this?

And I always think they're going to say, you know, Edmonton is awesome. Yeah. Is hard because it's so far away from everything and we're just not as well connected as other places. And I always hear the opposite. And I think that's really great. That's like a total change from, you know, 25 years ago where Edmonton really was treated as like pretty far and disconnected from everything.

And maybe that's acceleration of the pandemic and everything moving online and cloud computing and all of that. We are much more connected, but it's not a barrier. Like, being in Edmonton is not a barrier. And so then you look at the strengths and the community that we have, the number of support organizations we have, the fact that there's folks like us who are curious and want to support other people in our community, you know, all that kind of stuff, I think, really contributes to making it easier to get started here.

All businesses run into challenges and, you know, I don't want to take away from that. But there's a really good foundation here for, for entrepreneurs. I think.

Kelly Kennedy: You know, one of the things I tried to do with the business development podcast and still continue to try to do is shine a big, bright light on organizations, helping entrepreneurs here.

Obviously, this is one of those shows. Your taproot helps helps organizations across, across Alberta, for sure, if not Canada. But not just this, right? Like we've had, we've had Alberta Innovates. We've had Edmonton Unlimited. We've kind of tried to shine a big bright light on, on the business ecosystem and try to better understand the business ecosystem because there are so many supports here that it's hard to understand sometimes which ones are relevant and which ones aren't.

So one of the goals was to try to do that. I know you guys try to do the same thing, but you're right. It is amazing. I would say that Starting a business in Edmonton does give you a leg up because of all of the supports we have right here in Alberta.

Mack Male: And that sort of culture of support, right? I think compared to some other cities where maybe the natural culture is a little bit more competitive, a little bit more.

I'm gonna keep in secret until I get my thing going like here. I feel feel like folks are much more willing to be. How can I help? And tell me more about your building. I don't want to steal your thing. I want to figure out how I can help you do it faster or better or whatever. And that goes a long way, right?

And to have that supportive community here and for it to continue to evolve. You know, I think we talked about demo camp earlier. That was a big part of it. Lots of things started at demo camp, and it was because people were curious and wanted to support them, came out to learn more, you know, maybe met someone as a result at the beers afterward that some of those companies took off and several of them are Quite successful, right?

And it comes from that community of support.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, it's, it's amazing. Edmonton is great. If you guys are looking to do something cool, Edmonton's the place to come and do it. Mack , I wanted to talk a little bit about your podcast, speaking municipally, how did you, how did you end up doing that? Like, I want to know the story behind that.

Cause I think a lot of people are like, Oh man, like. It must be kind of hard to interview politicians all the time.

Mack Male: Well, it's kind of fun too. And also knowing that like we focus just on Edmonton, like local politics keeps us out of the fray a little bit of what happens at the province, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

But, you know, it started with my, my co host Troy Pavlik. He and I knew each other online. At some point, we got invited to do, like, a community, like charity trivia thing about Edmonton, and I can't remember if that was before the show or after, but anyway, we didn't know each other super well. But I knew that he paid a lot of attention to city council and seemed to be pretty interested in politics.

And I'd been doing that for a long time, again, on my blog, and then starting to do a little bit of that with Taproot. And, and one day he just pitched me. And he wrote me an email and it was really funny because Troy is a pretty funny guy and it was well written and he's like, this is a crazy idea, but I think we should do this.

What do you think? And, you know, he was much more hilarious than that. And, and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. We should try it. And you know, at the time we, There's lots of podcasters. We thought, what do we do here? Do we launch one? See how it goes. Do we prepare six episodes and then evaluate you know, do we want to commit to a whole year?

Like what? What is the commitment at the beginning? What if nobody listens? What if we run out of things to talk about? Like all the same questions that podcasters think about. But we got started and we adopted some of the things that taproot had already figured out, which is that if you do something every week, Over time, consistently it'll pay off, and so we started doing the podcast that way.

We started in the summer of 2018, and we, we just published this week our 265th episode. We, we are mostly weekly, we, we take time off when council's off, and so when they're off, we're off, and that gives us a little bit of a breather, at least some, to some extent. And you know, around holidays and things like that, but yeah, it's a lot of, a lot of episodes all about a pretty niche topic, right?

Municipal politics is not a thing that, A lot of folks, I think, care about or will get engaged on, certainly not enough to listen to a 30 to 45 minute show every week, but for folks who do want to understand what's happening and who really are interested you know, I think we're the primary place where they go for that kind of analysis.

And it is a place where we do more analysis than just reporting. We do interview folks, but a lot of the time it's Troy and I, sort of, Bringing our years of experience, paying attention to what happens at city hall and at city council to the current issue of the day to help people understand a little bit, like how could they possibly have made that decision or what led to this decision?

Like, how did we even get here? And so it's been, it's been fun.

Kelly Kennedy: I bet it has. And you know, it's one of those things that I don't follow very closely, but I recognize affects my life every single day being in Edmonton. But it's like most of the time, if I'm trying to figure out what's going on in politics, I do take it a step further.

And I'm looking at provincial politics, which, like you said, is like a back and forth mess. Most of the time. Do you find it's the same way locally or do you or most of the time are people on the same page trying to make Edmonton a better place?

Mack Male: I think that's our default starting assumption, right, is that if you're a city councillor, you only do that because you want to help make this a better place, and we might disagree about the best way to do that or how to go about it, but that's the starting point, right?

So it's really concerning what's happening in Alberta lately with potential changes to municipal elections and bringing parties into that system. You know, if that happens, I think that would be pretty negative overall for municipal politics. But, but yeah, throughout the history of our show, it's been that idea that if you're a city councillor.

You did that because you want to be a part of this community and you want to help it in some way. And the podcast is a way where we can highlight those examples of when folks are doing that, and we can also hold people to account. And ask questions about, you know, when they're doing something that doesn't seem aligned.

Or even, what often happens is a council will decide, Something and then a follow up decision later on seems totally out of line with that previous decision. It's like, but you guys agreed to do this. Why are you now doing that over there? And you know, the show has been a really good place for us to bring some of that accountability and some of that context to people who are, who are interested in this.

And it's hard. It's a lot of work to follow those threads over time. About we're also fortunate that we've had lots of great guests over the years. Every counselor, basically. Everyone on this current council did come on our show to do a little introduction. Not all of them will come on the show now that we've talked about them for a couple of years.

You know, lots of officials, city managers, like all those kinds of folks who can bring their expertise and help people understand things better has been has been really great and we've been fortunate to have those folks. And then I'm just grateful to have Troy on the show because he brings you know, this creative and approachable funny takes often, sometimes people don't like it.

could be off putting, but I think he helps make a pretty dry, boring topic a little bit more approachable for people. And he, and he knows his stuff, right? He just, he's got such a wealth of experience and and knowledge.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, first off, thank you for doing that. You know, that's, and I'll be straight, like there's a lot of podcasts you could have done.

Yeah. Which you probably would have gotten more recognition for. More personal good feelings about but you chose something that is so needed. And I do wonder like why did like and I mean this from me to you. You have a great personality. You've been in podcasting a long time. You understand the whole setup.

You could have easily done what I've done at the business development podcast on a tech level or something along those lines. No problem without even question. Why? Municipal politics. I do just have to ask because I'm thankful that you do it. And I think you guys do do a great job. And I think it is really required.

But is it just because of that, that journal, the journalist in you that needed to needed to go down that path? Or like, was it truly a passion for you?

Mack Male: Yeah. I mean, I think I've always just super, I think, I think maybe actually it comes down to what's a core value of Tapper, which is curiosity. And I'm, I'm curious about a lot of things.

I'm curious about business, but I'm especially curious about. What goes on at City Hall? And as you said, the sort of decisions that impact our day to day. And, you know, I was involved got myself involved in the news, which you're not supposed to do as a reporter, I guess, like when I was a blogger still with, you know, the city center airport and these really big discussions about the future of our city.

And I just saw firsthand how Anybody can get involved in those conversations and have an impact or help people understand something better or share their perspectives. And, and so when Troy pitched the idea for the podcast, it was like, yeah, I think that is needed. That's part of it. Like there wasn't anybody else doing that.

There wasn't another show about local politics. So that's a big, you know W in that column because it's just less competition. Initially, it's also potentially a sign that nobody wants to listen to that. But it really came down to like, if we're going to do a show and we're going to do for a while, it's got to be about something that we care about and that we're curious about.

Otherwise it's really hard to do. You know, I, I love local business and I'm sure I could you know, not get tired of interviewing local entrepreneurs, but other folks are doing that too and doing a great job of it like you and you know, there's a gap here and and, and it is a thing that I'm really interested in.

And I think the number of folks who are. That curious about City Council are far fewer than the folks who are curious about business. And so to have an opportunity to do that with somebody else, who's as curious as I am, like Troy was just like, we have to not pass up that opportunity. And you know, now we've done it for Have as many years as we've done, six years or something.

We've tried to build in some resiliency and we've had one of our new team members at taproot, relatively new team members, Stephanie, come and co host a few episodes. And so we're trying to, you know, we recognize the show is beyond just our passion in the, in the beginning. And we want to try and make sure that it.

Is resilient and then it can grow because we, we do think it could reach more people in Edmonton who, you know, might be a little bit curious about this kind of stuff, but that's where it started. Right. It was really, there is a gap. We are curious about it. It seems like pretty unique set of circumstances.

Let's not pass up that opportunity.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Cause that's how the business development podcast came from too, right? Like. I knew I needed to do something outward facing. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I knew that I love podcasts and I listen to them all the time. So it seemed like, okay, like this is an avenue, but like, Kelly, you've never done anything like this.

I remember multiple like back and forths, but I remember thinking the business development world doesn't have a big voice. It doesn't have somebody advocating, teaching, helping the next generation realize how important relationship building is, how important being a human still is in business development.

And dude, I remember looking at domains. And I remember the moment that I saw that the business development podcast as a name was available. The rest is, it just had to happen. That's what you gotta do. It was like, okay, there it is. That's, that's the universe saying this has to happen.

Mack Male: You sometimes, you sometimes need those little signs that you should go ahead with the idea, right?

And if it comes, you know, you can run with it. Yeah. I listen to a lot of podcasts too, maybe not as many as you, but I tend to listen to like really highly produced stuff. Like I love The Daily from the New York Times. Yeah. Probably my least kind of podcast is the two hour long gab fest between a couple of folks, right?

And it's just not my jam. And you know, that informed a little bit how we did the show, right? We wanted to keep it short. We wanted to keep it around half an hour. Most of our episodes now probably are a little bit closer to 40, 45 minutes. And when we have a guest, you know, if it's really good stuff, then we'll go longer because people want to hear more from that person or whatever.

But. You know, I was really worried that if it was Troy and I talking for two hours about city council, like, no, who would want to listen to that? That's got to be so boring. And so, you know, some of the sometimes those constraints can be really helpful, right? Because we know we're aiming for 30 minutes.

And so if we get close, that's good. And it forces us to really think about how we're going to use that time. Effectively with somebody. And so that's been a positive thing. And in other, in other contexts, it's totally fine to have a long conversation when it's something like municipal politics, you know, I think there's some value in keeping it brief.

Kelly Kennedy: No, I agree. I remember kind of thinking about how long are these shows going to end up being? And you know what? I came to you. I didn't care. Yeah. My rule was as long as I'm delivering value, I'm educating and inspiring with every episode. I don't really give a shit. It can be 10 minutes, it can be 30 minutes, it can be 45 minutes, or it can be an hour and 20 minutes.

We don't typically run much longer than an hour and 20 minutes, just because I know I'm not going to listen that long, probably. So, but, as long as we're able to deliver value, that's the secret.

Mack Male: I think that's the right starting point, right? Looking for analytics about how long do people typically listen, or how long is the average commute, or any of that kind of stuff.

Like it can be a signal, it can help inform your decision, but at the end of the day, like if you do something for you, I think it ends up with a better product for everyone. For other folks too, right? Like if it's solving a problem that you have is a thing that you would actually listen to a thing that you actually get value out of, then chances are good that other people are going to get value out of that too.

Kelly Kennedy: What's been super cool and I didn't see coming is that most of our episodes get listened to twice.

Mack Male: Interesting.

Kelly Kennedy: So most people listen once and then go back and take notes. And I can't tell you how many messages I've gotten that says, I take notes from every single of your, of your educational episodes for the business development podcast.

And it's true. It reflects, it shows that they've listened to the thing twice. It's, it's crazy. It's. I didn't see that coming. You know, I mean, I, I wasn't sure what I was going to look for, but I didn't expect people to listen twice.

Mack Male: We've noticed a similar thing, which is that you know, even our early episodes from 2018 still get listens.

And occasionally we'll have somebody mentioned that maybe they didn't start at the beginning, but they went back and listened to a bunch of our back catalog to get caught up. And that just blows my mind because a lot of the things we talked about. Six years ago are not relevant anymore, at least not directly, right?

There's maybe a tenuous connection or something. So interesting that that folks find value in that long tail, I guess, of coverage, right?

Kelly Kennedy: It's crazy. Probably 80 percent of our downloads are not the most recent episode.

Mack Male: Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: It's people going back and listening to the whole back catalog. And, you know, I guess that that's what you get when people can look up the guests they want to listen to, right?

Like, But it is, it's really cool. It's like, it's like, we're learning all the time. Analytics on podcasts are getting better all the time. I'm sure one day we'll be able to look and know exactly who's listening, where they're listening, why they're listening. But yeah, as you and me both know, they suck at the moment.

Mack Male: Yeah. Yeah. They're, they, they leave much to be desired, but on the other hand, it creates this opportunity for us to do, like you're saying, something you want to listen to something you want to create. You don't care about what other people think that's, you know, easier to do when you don't have the analytics staring at you.

Kelly Kennedy: True, yeah, yeah, there is something about that for sure, for sure. Mack k, this has been absolutely amazing. I do want to spend some time before we wrap up today, just chatting about, you know, what services do you guys offer through Taproot? You did mention that you are for profit, which means that you sell services of some type.

How can people support what you guys are doing?

Mack Male: Well, thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit more about that. I think first and foremost, if you're not already a subscriber to the pulse, which is our weekday newsletter, we'd love for you to sign up. It's free. It comes to your inbox every day and it's a really good overview of what's going on in Edmonton, original reporting from our team, as well as.

Curated stuff from from elsewhere. It's a really great way to orient yourself, I think, in our community. So I'd say that's number one Taproot has a multiple revenue streams, and that's been pretty intentional from the beginning too, because we could see what was happening in local news and across North America.

And, you know, it tended to be either they have a subscription where they rely on ads and, you know, you could do the math and just figure out that that just isn't going to be enough to make up for, you know, the The loss that we all have in our communities, the amount of money that used to be invested into journalism membership is really important.

So we started with membership. Actually, individuals can support taproot by becoming a member. Slight difference between membership and subscription. Subscription usually means you're paying for access. Membership is you're supporting the mission. All of our stuff is free to read available for anybody. If we do something we wanted to have as wide an impact as possible.

But if you're able and you're inclined, we'd love for you to become a member of taproots 100 a year. to support the work that we do. And then for organizations, currently there's kind of two mainstream. So sponsorship and advertising, which we do. As I said earlier, we don't do ads on our website, so we're not trying to sell page views or whatever, but organizations can sponsor our newsletters.

So it can be associated with making those things possible. And they can also run ads in our newsletters. So if they have a specific call to action for something an ad is a great way to do that. And Yeah. You know, we don't plaster them with ads. There's at most two in any edition, like it's high, high quality you know, targeted, relatively targeted audience that you're going to reach, right?

People who read Tablet are pretty engaged in Edmonton. And then the third thing that we do that I know as many people know about is a B2B offering. So lots of organizations have a need for media monitoring or tracking information about their community or that kind of thing. And, and we offer a service that does that.

So if you wanted to get like a. Daily or weekly or bi weekly or monthly briefing. Here's all the things you care about, or here's what's new about your community of organizations or people Taproot can help produce that. And that's called Spotlight. And that's been a, an effective way for us to grow our business.

You know, using the tools of journalism to solve problems that businesses have and and, and, and offer a return on investment for that. So that's been pretty cool. And we've got some other new stuff we're working on. We just launched the Taproot Edmonton calendar back at the end of December 2023.

And so we're really trying to become that, that primary place where people go to find out what's happening in our community. And the calendar is off to a really great start, more than 4, 000 events and a large number of them that are 30 days in the future, because we know that people, Always say I wish I knew about that sooner.

So we're really trying to solve that problem. And and, you know, we'd love organizations to support that mission as well through sponsorship or even partnership where, you know, if you've got a calendar on your website, chances are nobody's keeping it up to date. Why don't you embed our calendar and we'll do that on your behalf.

So, you know, some of those kinds of services that again, hopefully help contribute to the community. That's what we're trying to try to try to do. And all the ads and sponsors and stuff we have, you know, they're local or Alberta. We're not selling Pepsi ads or anything like that. So there's still a value to, to readers, right?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, that's amazing. And if people want to want to get in touch with you, want to, you know, discuss sponsorship or advertising with you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Mack Male: You can email us, probably. hello@taprootpublishing.ca or if you've got an editorial suggestion or something for our team, it's Hello@taprootedmonton.ca you can also just look up me, Mack Mail, or my co founder, Karen Unland. We're pretty easily findable on the Internet these days, I think you know, LinkedIn is probably the primary way that people reach out to us now, and we'd love to chat about how we might be able to help, you know, other local organizations do what they do in the community and and support the journalism that our amazing team is doing on a, on a daily basis, because I think it's really important that it exists in the community.

Lots of organizations in Edmonton, I think, are starting to realize that if they want someone to talk about their thing, There needs to be a place where it can be talked about and and, you know, supporting local journalism so that we continue to have a place for that, I think is really important.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes. No, I agree. The work that you guys are doing or is very important. Do not stop doing it. It's much needed. It's excellent. I love your roundups. I love the pulse, you know, keep it up. You guys are killing it. And the Edmonton business community owes you a big round of applause. I think there's a lot of companies that just would have never gotten spotlight without the work you guys are doing.

And it's great. And I'm a huge advocate.

Mack Male: Well, thank you so much. And also, thank you for doing your show because we've been able to point to a lot of great episodes of of local folks in our roundups of people you've interviewed and stories you've highlighted. So, you know, that's one of the things that our, our roundups rely on is.

People putting stuff out into the world. That's interesting and new and local and and the opportunity to draw attention to that work is, is one of the things we love best about what we get to do.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you for joining me, Mack . This has been episode 176 of the business development podcast.

We've been joined by Mack Malel of Taproot Publishing until next time. We'll catch you on the flip side.

Outro: Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business