New Politico Pro Newsletter Will Focus on Cannabis Regulation and Policy

• The newsletter will report on the cannabis sector with a serious, rather than friendly, tone.
• The subscription to the newsletter will be free until September 30^th.

One of the biggest problems with cannabis today is the lack of information readily circulating to the public. Politico Pro is trying to fix this problem by developing the first national policy outlet, including a cannabis team, according to reports from Washingtonian. The new vertical published a preview of the newsletter on Monday, and the public will be able to access this newsletter at no cost until the end of September.

Paul Demko, the editor for the cannabis section, commented,

“It’s a heavily regulated industry and a very rapidly changing one and it also sort of intersects with every policy area that Politico already covers. We also see a void in the media treating this like a multibillion-dollar, heavily regulated industry rather than an excuse to make weed jokes.”

The majority of the news in the cannabis sector has been covered by publications that focus on marijuana, like Marijuana Business Daily. So far, no other national policy publication has assigned a team that deals with the growing industry. Considering that the Politico Pro subscription service already has over 27,000 users, the number of people now able to learn about the changing policies in the cannabis industry is substantial.

Demko formerly has reported as a healthcare journalist. However, his move to reporting on the cannabis sector is joined by Natalie Fertig and Mona Zhang, a federal cannabis policy reporter and state cannabis policy reporter, respectively. Fertig has been a writer on cannabis policy for both Politico Magazine and Rolling Stone. Zhang, however, developed Word on the Trees, which is a daily newsletter on cannabis. She has also had bylines featured in Outline and Forbes.

Fertig stated, “It’s the ultimate policy job because it’s completely new. It’s a fruition of covering things that already existed in politics and now moving into something that doesn’t exist. It’s a new challenge.”

One of the big issues on this coverage is the fact that cannabis is federally illegal right now, despite 11 states having legalized both recreational and medical use. Along with the work of Fertig and Zhang, the network of state bureaus involved with Politico and Canada will be contributing to the reporting found on the cannabis sector.

Cannabis is being approached with a serious attitude, rather than the playful or conversational tone that other publications are taking. After all, it is a federal publication, and they plan to write about cannabis in a respectful way. Fertig explained,

“It’s the first major national new organization to create a full cannabis team and I think that’s a really amazing opportunity. We’re going to be doing some stuff that no one else is doing and we have the resources to do that.”