Building a better magazine remains top priority
Why futz around with losing weight and saving money?
For those of us who make them, New Year’s resolutions are the public announcements of all the promises we probably won’t keep over the course of our next 365 days around the sun.
Let’s just be honest … we may have all had a little too much Champagne prior to deciding 2016 would be the year of regaining a chiseled physique, saving more money, planning for retirement, learning a second language, breaking 80 on the golf course and finally reading Don Quixote.
So rather than proclaiming I’ll be a better, healthier, smarter and sexier version of myself, I thought I’d take this page to present 10 New Year’s resolutions for Marijuana Venture.
I hope our readers will enjoy a glimpse into our future, and I believe some of these aspirations will be the driving forces that keep us a leader in cannabis industry news and information.
– Explore uncharted territory: Our readers and advertisers probably know we’ve focused almost all our energy on the print edition of Marijuana Venture, often to the detriment of MarijuanaVenture.com. We believe there’s a great deal of value in print. While some might look at it as an old-school approach in a digital age, we see it as a key reason we’re different than the dozens of run-of-the-mill news aggregators flooding the Internet.
But now that we’re approaching our second anniversary, the time has come to make more of a push at developing our website and digital content. I’m not yet sure what it will look like, but you can expect big changes on the horizon.
– Build a better magazine: Marijuana Venture didn’t come out of the box as a polished, well-thought-out product. It’s taken a lot of hours and a lot of wrong turns to get where we are. Our first issue (now referred to as the “collector’s edition”) was an eight-page black-and-white newsletter that didn’t even have staples.
In less than two years, our page count has grown by 20 times. It’s been a hectic roller coaster, but I couldn’t be more proud of what our tiny little team has achieved. However, my expectations for 2016 remain sky-high. We won’t keep putting out the same magazine month after month after month. We will be the publication that is continually improving its look and content.
– Spend more time visiting: It’s a tough job, but somebody has to visit as many grow operations and retail stores as humanly possible. In the 21st century, many journalists find it tough to balance time spent plugging away at stories, emails and surfing the web with real, face-to-face interactions and news gathering.
Some days I spend eight hours in the office (and usually a couple more at home) doing nothing but sending and responding to emails. It’s a fact of life, but it takes away from the important work of getting your hands dirty and digging to find the stories that matter. Perhaps I miss the simpler days of playing in sandboxes, but I’d like to make it an emphasis to step away from the laptop a bit more often.
– Stick to the mission: My first assignment upon being hired by Marijuana Venture was to write my own personal mission statement — a rundown of what I wanted to do and how we could launch a first-rate marijuana business magazine.
At that time, the company itself didn’t even officially exist, and we were tentatively calling our future publication “Reefer Business.”
“My vision is to develop the first — and best — trade magazine dedicated to the legal marijuana industry in Washington and Colorado, and expanding as other states get closer to legalization,” I wrote to Greg James, who would take on the role as publisher.
“Reefer Business” was nixed in the early going — thankfully, in retrospect — but I’m happy to be able to say we’ve never swayed from our original game plan.
– Expand our reach: For every person out there reading Marijuana Venture, I believe there are three or four others who should be reading it. When we launched the magazine, we were focused solely on business owners in Washington. Within a year and a half, we rapidly expanded into every other state with some form of legal cannabis, and are now distributed by major retail chains like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Hastings and Fred Meyer, among a variety of other shops and independent book stores.
While business owners and managers will continue to be our target demographic, I think we’ll also gain more and more traction among potential investors, the former black market operators who want to stop looking for helicopters in the sky and cannabis enthusiasts looking for something more substantial than “Five reasons to vape” or “10 strains that will make your mouth water.”
The business owners of tomorrow will be following the paths of Marijuana Venture readers today.
Garrett Rudolph
Editor