Speaking Municipally

Troy Pavlek: Can you get rid of the rapid fire segment next? This week, we're back, but I'm only back for a bit.
Mack Male: We're making some changes for election season. We'll get into it.
Troy Pavlek: Hi, I'm Troy.
Mack Male: I'm Mack.
Troy Pavlek: And we're Speaking Municipally.
Mack Male: Speaking Municipally.
Troy Pavlek: Welcome back to Speaking Municipally, Episode 316. We're back off the break, uh, and we hinted at it in the title, but, uh, may not be back for long, at least in my case. We'll, we'll get into it. Uh, this is officially the teaser. You put the teaser before the ad so that people don't change the channel, and we're gonna read the ad right now. This episode is brought to you by the Alberta Motor Association, which can help you with more than just towing your vehicle. You can get three months free on an AMA community membership. That's less than $50 per year. An AMA community membership can save you up to $870 a year on things you're already buying, like groceries and takeout. AMA is partnered with brands like Uber, PetSmart, Winners, Sobeys, and Sephora. Plus, you save on AMA services like insurance, travel, and registries. Get three months free on a community membership today by visiting ama.ab.ca/threefree. That's three spelled out. T-H-R-E-E-F-R-E-E. ama.ab.ca/threefree. Okay. Um, so we paid our bills, and, uh, now it's capitalism time. You first get the income and then you cut staff to increase corporate profits, right?
Mack Male: (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: That's, that's the story we're going with?
Mack Male: That's the way it seems to work if you pay attention to the popular headlines out there.
Troy Pavlek: Jokes that we're making some changes this election season, and, uh, we'll say it in my voice so that, uh, it's not you fire me, I quit. But I'm taking a step back during election season. Those who follow me closely, uh, you know, this may not be the most surprising of news. I have taken a passionate interest in this election season. You know, I've always done code switching on the podcast where I say things on Twitter and on Instagram that I won't say on the podcast. Everyone gets a little bit more amped up during election season, myself included, and that delineation is getting a little bit struggling on the podcast.
Mack Male: Yeah, so we've mutually agreed that Troy is going to step back from the podcast until after the election. So, the show, we plan to continue having the show run every week. Usually, it'll be me and Stephanie co-hosting. You've heard Stephanie on here several times before. At least until we get in- into the election. We'll get into the reasons why. Uh, so it's not goodbye forever, Troy, but it's a sort of thank you for now, if I can put it that way.
Troy Pavlek: You're welcome for now.
Mack Male: Yeah.
Troy Pavlek: I think a good place to start is just getting some things out in the air because, you know, I will go to events and people will say, "You know, how is it working for Mack at Taproot?" And I'm like, "Well, I don't, so can't answer that question."
Mack Male: Yeah. I'm sure your boss loves that-
Troy Pavlek: (laughs)
Mack Male: ... when he thinks you work for somebody else.
Troy Pavlek: He also gets phone calls for me to be fired regularly from, uh, people upset with what I do. So, you know, I don't work for Taproot. I'm a software developer. I do this stuff recreationally. Taproot does pay me a small honorarium per podcast, but the only thing I'm involved with, with Taproot is I co-produce, co-host, and edit these podcast episodes. Uh, I'm not involved in like Taproot's reporting, pitching, uh, editorial process. I do this recreationally while Mack is full-time, like this business is his business.
Mack Male: Yeah.
Troy Pavlek: I write code for a living, and I pass the time by engaging in municipal politics. One could argue I could have more rewarding hobbies that, uh, are less stressful, but this is the hobby that I've chosen. And, uh, it's something that I do for, in my off time.
Mack Male: It's something that we've always been so impressed by, speaking for both myself and my co-founder at Taproot, Karen Unland. You know, she's always saying like, "It's such a gift to have someone like Troy in our community." So, you, you love city politics and you pay attention to it and you understand it and you have a way of making it engaging. And I don't know if you look around, there's nobody else doing that. Nobody else has a podcast about municipal politics. So, I think it's pretty incredible that you do that. I think it's one of the things that brought us together when you first pitched me on getting the podcast going back-
Troy Pavlek: Seven years ago.
Mack Male: ... seven, seven years ago.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah, 2018.
Mack Male: 'Cause I was doing something similar with my blog, right? It was like my fun thing was to pay attention to city council and blog about it.
Troy Pavlek: (laughs) Something is wrong with us, just on a fundamental level.
Mack Male: It seems to be, but it was a match that worked, right? And so we decided to try and take that b- that approach that both of us had and do that in podcast form, and here we are.
Troy Pavlek: Why are we making this change? What's the causing factor? Did, uh, someone call for me to be fired? Was, was that the problem here?
Mack Male: I mean, I think it'll do like a five whys here, right? Isn't that the best practice? And we'll, and we'll-
Troy Pavlek: I don't know. I'm not a journalist.
Mack Male: (laughs) We'll get to the root of it, but I think there's some introductory stuff that I should say, right? So, about Taproot, you know, we value transparency and so that's the reason we're having this conversation on the podcast today rather than just making a change and having the episode come out and having it not be you and then people not knowing what's happening, right? We wanna be upfront about that kind of stuff. And I think we've always tried to be as transparent as possible with our process and the way that we do things. You know, we've written blog posts in the past explaining why we have certain sponsors and, you know, all that kind of stuff. We have always rejected the pretense of pure objectivity, right? So this idea in journalism that you can be objective, it's called the view from nowhere. You write as if you're up on high in the Ivory Tower seeing the world as it actually is. We, we don't think that actually exists, and we've never pretended that that exists. We understand that people have different experiences, perspectives, biases, et cetera. So, we try to embrace those. We try to be upfront about those. It's not a secret, I think, where you and I stand on a lot of issues, Troy. We're pretty upfront about saying, "Yeah, I worked on this thing," or, "This is the way I think about that." And our journalists too, we, we don't try to, um, persuade anyone. That's not what we're trying to do, but we don't also hide our experiences and our biases and the fact that we live centrally, for example, or, or whatever the, the aspect of the reporter is, right?But we are committed to fairness. That is one of the core ethical principles that we follow and in the context of an election, especially to this idea of neutrality. So that's different than objectivity, right? Objectivity is this idea that there's a view from nowhere, that perspectives don't exist and biases don't exist. Neutrality is more we're not trying to put our thumb on the scale.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: We're not gonna take a position about who's better than somebody else. We're not trying to convince you about who to vote for. All we're interested in doing is equipping you with the information to go and make that decision for yourself. So we don't wanna influence the outcome beyond making everyone have, uh, that, that we can possibly reach make a more informed decision. I think about you, Troy, and I think of you as a commentator, although, you know, we often talk about people committing acts of journalism and I think you've done that several times over the years on this show and in your, uh, regular, uh, hobby work that you do, right?
Troy Pavlek: We don't, we don't know how to describe it. My antics, I think-
Mack Male: (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: ... is the best way to describe it.
Mack Male: I mean, you don't describe yourself as a journalist, even though other people do, right? And I think maybe one distinction that might be helpful for folks is just you're not a reporter.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: But you could be considered a columnist, and both of those are journalists. But the-
Troy Pavlek: Yeah. And-
Mack Male: ... I guess the additional caveat is it's not your job. (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: There's a difference between someone who is giving opinions, uh, based on no facts. Before I make a joke post on Reddit, I'll pull up the open data catalog. If I have a question about the elections, I'll email the city clerk and I'll get answers and then publish those answers. I do the requisite research, but, you know, I, I, I think back to just a few weeks ago, Michael Walters. I knew he was running for mayor. I published that he was running for mayor, and then I talked to Jeremy Thompson at CTV and he's like, "Look, if Michael Walters doesn't confirm to us, to our satisfaction, we can't run this segment and we'll run something else." And lo and behold, he didn't confirm to-
Mack Male: Right.
Troy Pavlek: ... Jeremy's satisfaction. And that's just, you know, differences in organizations, differences in thresholds. And I think the idea of journalism as, like, a, like, has a professional designation or a college doesn't quite exist. There's no, like, college of journalists that will revoke your journalism license. This is why I don't call myself a journalist. People hear that, and they hear a seriousness that I think I don't aspire to. I like to think, you know, Hank Green is not a scientist, but he's a science communicator. He aims to have people understand things better. And, like, that's the goal. I want people to understand municipal politics better and I wanna do it in a good way, but I don't wanna do it in a way that's prescribed to me.
Mack Male: And as a journalism organization, there is unfortunately in Canada an actual designation now for organizations-
Troy Pavlek: Yes.
Mack Male: ... which is highly flawed, but in any case, beyond that, what most people who do identify as journalists or organizations that identify as journalism organizations adhere to is the Canadian Association of Journalists and their ethics guidelines. So as you point out, it's not a college. It's not a thing where they're gonna revoke your license to be a journalist. Like, that doesn't exist, but it is a set of common rules and understanding that we all agree to, and Taproot does adhere to that.
Troy Pavlek: Which isn't a bad thing.
Mack Male: Yeah.
Troy Pavlek: I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have organizations held to a level of account. I argue we should probably have a higher level of accountability for some journalism organizations, but, you know-
Mack Male: Yeah, yeah.
Troy Pavlek: ... alas.
Mack Male: I think our approach in general, l- like what you just said there, you want to help people understand better and the way that you go about it is just the way that you go about it, I think that's always been in alignment with Taproot. That is our mission actually. When we wrote down, when we did the work to figure out, like, what is our mission statement, it was we wanna help communities understand themselves better. That's what we try to do. More recently... (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: (laughs) Oh, we're getting into it now.
Mack Male: I think our approaches have, uh, diverged a little bit or come into conflict or, or they're just different, and I'm, I'm not trying to pass a judgment over whether one is better than the other. It's just your approach is different than ours, and that has caused a blurring of the lines, and what we described earlier about how you're a contractor, you're not an employee, and all those kinds of things is hard for people to wrap their heads around apparently. And so it's made it a little bit difficult to do some of the other things that Taproot wants to do and not have it be called into question by work that you're doing that wouldn't, you know, live up to the sort of values and standards that Taproot as a journalism organization adhering to these guidelines would feel comfortable, right?
Troy Pavlek: Yeah, I mean, and if we put it in plain language, you said earlier Taproot doesn't endeavor to put its thumb on the scale electorally, which is probably a good thing to aspire to for someone who's doing election coverage. I do desire to put my thumb on the scale. Uh, people who follow me on other platforms will have seen the scale being thumbed-
Mack Male: Yes.
Troy Pavlek: ... pretty actively, and I don't endeavor to stop doing that. If we're talking about Taproot's election coverage, what you're doing is based on this election survey, right? You do a survey for all candidates. You're able to create a matching engine for citizens to fill out and find their preferred candidate, and you're able to do coverage based on the response of the survey. If that survey doesn't get filled out, you're kind of boned. That is one of the main thrusts, and I can empathize with a candidate who might not want to fill out a survey of an organization that employs, I'm doing heavy air quotes, someone with their thumb on the electoral scale. Uh, I'm not employed. I'm not affecting the coverage, but, you know, I, I appreciate that someone who doesn't listen to the podcast because they don't like me, they wouldn't a- appreciate that distinction. And again, all of this, I think we can all agree, not a problem two years ago or two years from now. At election time, people tend to get hypersensitive to some of these issues.
Mack Male: It's just easier to be perceived as putting your thumb on the scale during an election, right?
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: Like, during the-
Troy Pavlek: Well, 'cause there's stakes.
Mack Male: Yeah, there's, you, during the course of s- council's term, we're talking about issues. You're sharing an opinion, an informed, (laughs) you know, you've done the homework opinion about something, and that is to help people understand something better, but there's no way for you to do anything about that in, in, beyond what any other citizen can do, right?
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: Um, elections are-... challenging beasts. Like you said, everyone kinda gets a little bit extra amped up. There's a little bit more energy. And you've been doing something that I think is interesting, but not what Taproot wants to do. And we can... We sometimes describe it as, like, horse race coverage, right? Like, who's ahead? Who's sniping at who? Who's entering the race? Who's coming up from behind? Who's taking the lead? Like, horse race coverage. That's not what Taproot is interested in doing. I think in all of this, you know, there's different approaches that you can take and you just have to make a choice about the approach that you're gonna take. And for Taproot, it's about that provide people with the information, equip them to understand something better, not get distracted and pulled into the sport of it. And the sort of easy, cheap coverage, like, we don't need to sell page views, so we don't need people to click on our thing in order to continue to do the work that we do. So that frees us to take a different approach and to focus on things in a different way, and so that's what we wanna do. I said what you've done is interesting 'cause-
Troy Pavlek: (laughs)
Mack Male: ... you are doing a little bit more of that horse race coverage and there's obviously a place for it because it's not like no one's paying attention to you.
Troy Pavlek: It's working. And for those who don't follow, because honestly the audiences don't overlap that much in what I've observed, I've got an Instagram and TikTok account and an associated YouTube account, and I've been doing short form video for the past, you know, five, six months, trialing, dipping my toes into the water, and I expected it to be a trial and a failure. Mostly it was stemmed from my upsetness with Twitter or X being intolerable. You know, you were on the early-
Mack Male: Ugh.
Troy Pavlek: ... Twitter. You lament the loss as much as I do.
Mack Male: I mean, I love that platform. I gave way too much of my time and energy to that platform, and now I, I never go there. I never use it.
Troy Pavlek: It, it's, it's just not very good anymore. And so I looked at where all the cool kids were, and it seems to be TikTok and Instagram Reels these days. I loathe the idea of talking to a camera, but it's what the kids want, so I tried it out and it's resonating with people. And I think, like, to your point about the approaches all having merit, but you just have to choose one, you know, I did a video recently about Michael Walters entering the city council race. It's what you talked about. It's horse race politics. It's who, how does this affect the other candidates? It's not about policy, it's about personalities. And it got quite a bit of attention, but I also got dozens of direct messages from people saying, "You know, thanks. I didn't know about this. How do I find out if Michael Walters is a good candidate to vote for?" And I responded to all these people, "You don't." There is no resource available to you to figure out if your positions align with what Michael Walters believes. There's no place for you to find out what Michael Walters believes. And unless you want to trawl through city council voting records esoterically from, like, 2013 to 2017, you can't find out about his record. You can't find out about if what he says is what he actually voted for. This is where, you know, (laughs) I've supported Taproot for a long time because what you do is valuable. The coverage you're gonna do in this election will be valuable to answer that question. But, like, I think there is room for both approaches. I think there's a lot of disengagement in municipal politics. I think when you look at things like YEGWave, which I hate to say is a force for good, it's not, but what YEGWave is doing is connecting with people and you have to learn from that, right? In the same way that, like, Trump connected with people south of the border. We don't want him to be president, but you do have to learn from what he did and see what is the difference here. And so I think there's value in some of the horse raciness, some of the scummy coverage, some of the TMZ of it all, and I wanna keep doing it, at least in this election period, because it is engaging people in this election. And therein lies the mutual, uh, stepping away, because what Taproot is doing is valuable. What I'm doing, I believe is valuable. The synthesis of them together is kind of confusing and kind of mixed messaging.
Mack Male: Yes. And I would say as someone building a media company, it's already really hard. (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: (laughs)
Mack Male: And making it harder than it needs to be doesn't sound like a very good business strategy, right? And so I hope listeners are not taking from this episode that we don't think they're smart enough to tell the difference between what Troy is doing and what Taproot's doing. That's not what we're saying.
Troy Pavlek: And I mean, if we're being honest, our listeners listening to this aren't the problem. Uh-
Mack Male: No, absolutely not. As you pointed out the other day when we were talking about this, maybe some limited overlap, like to your point about what you're doing and what we're doing and the synthesis of them maybe not being so great, I think that's true, but I also think there's maybe a connection there, right? In the same way that those dozen people that DM'd you and said, "Where do I go to learn more?" Like, we want Taproot to be the place where they can go learn more. There will be the election survey that Michael Walters will have filled out with a position on lots of different issues that you can use to figure out if he aligns with you. Our reporters will be looking at voting records. They will be doing the, the homework to understand how someone, you know, voted in the past versus what they're talking about now in the campaign, and then interviewing them to ask questions about whether or not that is a natural progression, whether their views have changed for some reason, like, really trying to get at that understanding. So I do think there's an opportunity for the kind of thing that you're doing in the TikTok world and, and in those other videos to lead people into what we're doing. Not everybody. Obviously way more people are gonna open up their Instagram app or their TikTok app every day and, and mindlessly, you know, thumb through the videos. That's what people do. Like, there's no, there's no use fighting that. That is just the way that people behave. But back to the choice, I want Taproot to be the place where people go with intentionality.... where they go intentionally to say, "I don't want to spend all my time on those videos today. I want to understand this thing better. Where do I go to do that? Taproot can help me do that." And that's going to be a smaller subset of people, obviously, like by definition, but that's okay. That's the kind of organization that we want Taproot to be. And so, you know, the stepping away from the podcast is a way to reinforce that in some ways, to help make that messaging clearer for folks and to, as I said, not make it any harder than it (laughs) needs to be to try to accomplish what we want to accomplish.
Troy Pavlek: An enterprising listener might be listening to this and then thinking about a particular campaign who-
Mack Male: We're onto the third why. Here we go.
Troy Pavlek: (laughs) Yeah. You know, "Let's talk about what I've actually done." In the past, I have amped up my antics in the past couple weeks. Uh, the most recent amping up of the antics involved a joke where I printed "absent for holiday" flyers and then pasted them on the Better Edmonton office, which I hold is an exceptionally funny joke.
Mack Male: (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: I, I think I executed it very well. It was, you know, a step towards a line, right? There is a difference between making a Twitter post about, "I don't like this candidate," and then going to a physical space and putting up a physical thing. I hold if there's a line, I've still not have crossed the line, but reasonable people can disagree about that. But what I think is true is that it is not a difference from what I've been doing the past several years. I took out a billboard against Mike Nickel. I hate to mention this because I don't want the new mayor to hate me, but, like, in the previous election, I, uh, took pictures of Michael Walter's lawn signs, and he was very, very mad about that and felt that it stepped over the line. And so, like, this is a thing that I've been doing for a long time. It's always caused consternation around election time. So, a listener might be listening to this podcast and saying, "I saw Tim Cartmell get mad, and now Tim Cartmell called Taproot and made this whole thing up."
Mack Male: Yeah, I just want to be clear, like, this is not a reaction to any one person or any one campaign or any one customer or any one interaction where somebody has said, "Hey, Troy on the podcast is a problem for me."
Troy Pavlek: And we have had those in the past that-
Mack Male: We've had several of those in the past-
Troy Pavlek: (laughs)
Mack Male: ... and we've always dealt with them by th- in the same way, basically explaining to people that, "You're a contractor and not an employee. We can't control what you do with your time. We think you bring a lot of value to the discourse around municipal politics," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's an accumulation of those things that happens, and as we've already said, around election time, it just becomes even more touchy for folks. That's, for me, why this is the timing on this. We actually had a conversation before you started doing all this with Karen and, and Tim, our managing editor, because we knew, like, heading into election season, there's gonna be more consternation from folks about the way that we're talking about things or the way that you share things in your channels and all that kind of stuff. And we agreed at the time that... Actually, I think what we agreed at the time is we should put out a disclosure statement, which we never actually did.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: But the main thing we agreed is that we'll keep monitoring the situation. We'll keep having this conversation. And so for me, that's kind of where we've arrived now, which is that we've continued having this conversation. Since then, we have heard from campaigns, we have heard from customers. That accumulation, as I said, is making things difficult. And so in the interest of putting Taproot in the best position possible to achieve its election goals, not coming up with some new arrangement that restricts you and the things that you want to do and the value that you're bringing, this seems like the logical step.
Troy Pavlek: I think when we had the conversation early on, pre-election season, I think there was a hope by almost everyone in the room that what I was doing externally to the podcast would fail, um, because that was a very real possibility. It was like, "I tried something-"
Mack Male: It was, it was very new. We didn't know, right?
Troy Pavlek: Yeah, we didn't know if it would find success. And, like, if it didn't find success, it probably wouldn't be a problem because no one would have seen it, no one would have cared, and it wouldn't be thumbing a scale because it doesn't matter. I think what we've seen is that it is connecting with a broader audience, and that's why it's a problem. And, you know, we all kind of knew if it did connect with a broad audience, we would have a problem, but we were all kind of in the room as like, "You know, right now, there's not a problem. There might be a problem closer to the election." And we're at that bridge now. I have to say, though, bad timing for you-
Mack Male: (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: ... as Taproot. Uh, y- you look down, uh, at CBS, and it does feel a lot like you're CBS and I'm Colbert and you're canceling me.
Mack Male: I mean, that would be pretty high praise to call us CBS and you Colbert, for one thing.
Troy Pavlek: (laughs) I could take Colbert salary. If-
Mack Male: (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: ... you want to give me $15 million a year, I'll take it. I will become a Taproot employee for that amount of money.
Mack Male: Yeah, I mean, well, if there was a merger happening here, we were somehow financially benefiting from this decision, I don't know, like... (laughs)
Troy Pavlek: Is there a Postmedia acquisition of Taproot coming up?
Mack Male: No acquisition that I'm aware of. Like, that is... You know, I get that that's in the news right now. It's an ongoing thing. I think it's pretty hilarious what happened then with South Park the very next day. You know, they do this $1.5 billion deal, and then they immediately publish an episode making fun of Trump and all the rest of it. And Colbert, to his credit, right away, to also, you know, he, he hinted at it in his monologue, right, when he announced the news. And now he's got this incredible runway of time in which to really go after it, I think.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: Um, so I'm, I'm excited to see that. But that's not what this is. There's no money involved in this. It's, it's not like making this decision is good for business or whatever. It's-
Troy Pavlek: And critically, Colbert is a forever ending. This is a October ending. It's, uh, October 20th, something very important will happen in the City of Edmonton, and then the temperature should decrease quite a bit after that.
Mack Male: Hopefully, hopefully. So, we're not Paramount, we're not CBS, we're not Colbert, but I can understand why people might have that in their minds.
Troy Pavlek: When we talked about this earlier this week, the point of struggle that I had is like, I said, "Yep, I'm supportive of, like, Taproot as an organization and the business interests and the, like, electoral coverage interests. That all sounds good to me." But then I open up edmontonjournal.com and I see, like, Lorne Gunter constantly attacking Trudeau's mayor on no basis of fact. I see David Staples saying Michael Walters is the air incarnate and the savior of Edmonton. And I just, like... It doesn't feel like you're held to the same standard at Taproot that every other organization of media in the city is held to.
Mack Male: Yes.(laughs)
Troy Pavlek: (laughs)
Mack Male: Uh, I don't know, I don't, I, I don't know how to talk about it without sounding super whiny or whatever.
Troy Pavlek: Yeah, it's like, this is a thing. I've teed you up to whine and complain-
Mack Male: A little bit.
Troy Pavlek: ... about how hard your life is.
Mack Male: I mean, these are the cards we've been dealt, right? And the challenge of, for us, is just to figure out how to play a good hand, right? It is true, I think, and there's been lots of instances over the years where we just haven't been afforded the same courtesies as other media, whether it's around this kind of thing, like an- an- a trustworthiness around editorial lines and judgment-
Troy Pavlek: Which is also, like, a bit ironic. Can you... Taproot is the only news org I can think in the city that doesn't do any opinion journalism or editorials.
Mack Male: Currently, right? Except for, for this podcast, I suppose, right?
Troy Pavlek: Yeah.
Mack Male: You know, there's other things. It's, it's not wanting to talk to reporters for some reason. It's not understanding that what we are doing is journalism. And no, you don't get to look at the story before we publish it. It's having people call us after a story to complain about something that they didn't like. And my, thinking to myself, "Are they also calling the newspaper and talking to them and the radio station that also did this? Or is it because we're small and they know who we are 'cause we're actively in this community top to bottom," right? So it is frustrating from time to time, but, you know, what can you do about it? You can just try to do the best with what you've got. That's what we've always tried to do. We always try to do more good and just keep doing what we're doing and, and try to make as much as possible values-based, principles-based decisions, right? And that's again what this is about, right? Like, we are clear about what Taproot is, why it exists, the approach we're gonna take, what's inbounds and what's outbound, out of bounds. So how do we make sure that when we're making a decision about something, we follow that? And then over time explain that to people. Hopefully people understand that, they learn that, Taproot grows. You know, one of the affordances we just don't have because we're new is we don't have the reach and the audience that some of the, uh, other media organizations have built up. There's lots of reasons for that, structural and otherwise, that are, are challenging. But that is a thing that for a lot of folks, they overlook a lot of everything else because they think, say Post Media still has incredible reach in this city. I question that today given the realities of information and, and distribution and all the rest of it. But the perception remains, and as we know from other conversations we've had on this podcast, sometimes the perception is all that matters.
Troy Pavlek: So I guess in a standard format, you're supposed to tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. So let's tell everyone what we told them. Uh, so the takeaways here is this isn't a forever break. We're mutually benching me off the podcast for the duration of the election, but I will still exist. Um, I'm gonna be doing stuff. And if you'll afford me the guest plug segment here, Mack, there's plenty of ways you can find what I'm doing. The first of which is like, I have an email, troy@tpavlek.me, or just, like, google my name and you'll find me as... I'm very easy to find. You can send me an email with any, like, questions or things you want covered in a horse raise-y TMZ way and, you know, that's something that I can do. I'm primarily doing coverage on... I do candidate tracking on troypavlek.ca. That's where I'm tracking all the candidates who are running and doing some analysis on that. I've got a TikTok, troypavlek. I've got an Instagram, troypavlek.politics, and a YouTube channel. All of this is eminently Google-able. I trust your ability to find this. Or just email me and I can share it. But this is... My plan going into the election is I do want to have a bit of a thumb on the scale. I think specifically in this climate, there are candidates that are engaging in, in this election in bad faith and there are candidates that are engaging in this election in good faith. And what I wanna do is I want to highlight to everyone the importance of this municipal election, I want to make my biases clear, and I want to make it engaging. Uh, this is the thing that I think is missing in most municipal elections in the city of Edmonton. It's why our turnout is so low, is just people are not engaged, and I think people look at voting records for members of parliament. In provincial elections, people engage in looking up party histories, and I think this is the thing where, like, I believe that if we can get people through the door and get them excited and interested and curious about a municipal election, the stuff Taproot is doing is gonna go hog wild just as well because people want the information. They just don't know yet that they want it. And I, I think I've hit on a goldmine here where I can convince them that they want that information. So you can see me on the brain rot TikToks and Instagram Reels, uh, engaging in Zoomer culture, uh, trying to make success there.
Mack Male: Taproot will continue to try to be the place that you're talking about, whether you come to us through one of Troy's TikToks or whether you come to us some other way. We want Taproot to be the place that you can come to that's trustworthy, that has information, and that seeks to help you understand things better. We really are thinking a lot about how do we serve the needs of the users that we reach. Obviously, how do we reach more users as well, but, you know, for the ones that are coming to us, how do we make sure we do a really good job of helping them make a better decision?... the thing that are going to be making a better decision about right away here is an election and, and who to vote for. And so that's what we're really focused on. Beyond the election, Taproot will continue to try to provide people with that kind of information, continue to try to serve those, those user needs. So we don't want to throw away all the good work that we've done here, Troy. You know, we've got seven years, 316 episodes. We've done a lot of really incredible stuff, I think, over the... over that time in terms of covering-
Troy Pavlek: As an aside, I think about 50 episodes ago, we became the longest running politics podcast from Edmonton. I'm pretty sure second place was the Edmonton Journal's former podcast, which we eclipsed. So, you know, post haste kudos to us. The... We have built something here that, like, has stood the test of time.
Mack Male: That's right. And we want it to continue growing. We want it, we want it to continue having a, a positive impact. So the show will go on and Taproot will keep doing this show. You'll keep doing the thing that you're doing and then we'll come back again when temperatures have cooled down a little bit. We'll revisit all of this and we'll go from there.
Troy Pavlek: Okay, and for one last time, let's do some bad jokes written by me. Edmonton's K-Days continues to innovate their Midway Food Fair, this year offering up a new attacks all the senses dish, deep-fried dill pickle bear spray. It's available in the Midway for $26.
Mack Male: The City of Edmonton has announced that the fiscal gap has been closed after they accounted for Sarah Hamilton's contributions to the swear jar.
Troy Pavlek: And just (laughs) as an aside, I got so many emails as the podcast released literally, like, hours after Sarah Hamilton swore in council chambers. It is regrettable the timing of all of that, that we didn't get to cover that scenario.
Mack Male: I ran into people on the street too who were like, "Hey, you guys are on a publishing break, right? Like, I bet you're really lamenting the timing on that." And it's like, "Well, there's always stuff happening. There's no good time."
Troy Pavlek: There is time for one last bad joke, and that is after two former UCP MLAs hit roadblocks starting a new party with the PC name, the Alberta Party has announced plans to rename itself to the PC Party as a way of getting around it. Premier Danielle Smith was nonplussed, saying, quote, "First they come for our names like Oliver and Churchill. Do you really want to vote for these woke PC culture types who are embarrassed by the name Alberta?" And as always, Speaking Municipally is a publication of Taproot Edmonton. You can find everything that Taproot is doing at taprootedmonton.ca. And you can find everything that I'm doing on google.com. Uh, maybe ChatGPT can find it. I don't know. Ask your friend. Go out on the street and say, "Have you heard what Troy is doing?" And someone might have.
Mack Male: Failing all of that, it'll also be in the show notes with easy, clickable, followable links.
Troy Pavlek: That's actually much easier. Until next, after the (laughs) election period for me, but next week for the rest of the podcast, I'm Troy.
Mack Male: I'm Mack.
Troy Pavlek: And we're-
Mack Male: Speaking Municipally.
Troy Pavlek: Speaking Municipally.