Meet Jeremy Berke, Business Insider’s First Cannabis Beat Reporter
This journalist talks about pitching the cannabis beat and covering the industry for the past six years at Business Insider.
Jeremy Berke has been interested in cannabis since he started smoking recreationally in his teens but he never imagined that a decade later, it would be a professional focus.
“I actually grew up in Toronto, and since Canada was ahead of the curve, in high school I used to go to these big 4/20 marches in downtown Toronto,” Berke said. “However, that was for fun so I never really thought that a decade later it’d be a professional focus.”
Being straight out of college in 2015, Berke went from covering breaking news in the fast-paced Business Insider newsroom to being a current senior reporter at the same publication with a focus on the cannabis industry.
“It started when I wrote a one-off story in 2016 about a court case involving a dispensary in Oakland,” he said. “After that article, I got a lot more feedback and sources in my inbox than anything I’d written before so I felt people were thirsting for coverage of this industry that’s not ‘10 Best Weed Strains.’”
After that one story, it gradually snowballed into half of his coverage becoming about cannabis until he became the only senior reporter exclusively covering the emerging industry at Business Insider.
“My stories got a little stronger and a little better. I started going to events, and at the time it was becoming a much larger economic story,” he said. “By the end of 2017, I had a sit down with my editors and was like ‘hey look I’m really into this.’”
These editors gave Berke a trial period of a month to gauge the audience’s interest in this beat and his stories knocked the targets they set out of the park. And the cannabis beat was born. This proved that there was a huge opportunity for coverage, especially in a business publication.
“It’s not surprising because this beat crosses so many different interesting subject areas: plant science, the science of sustainability, tax policy, regulatory law, and state government,” he said.
For all the noteworthy things about this beat, there are still several obstacles that Berke has encountered especially because of the negative perceptions surrounding cannabis.
“Stigma and perceptions die really hard. I’ve even spoken to former professors of mine who were like ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Why are you staking your reputation on this?’ ‘I don’t get it: it’s a drug and it’s bad; we should be going the opposite way,’” he said. “I’m trying to erase the stigmas, to help people take this seriously because if not, we get bad policies written that don’t actually help the people that these policies are designed to help.”
Berke also constantly encounters problems when trying to access reliable information.
“It’s like: what information should I rely on because it’s not very clear yet who has reliable data and that is on me to try and figure out,” he said. “Like any emerging industry, there’s a lot of shady actors that don’t necessarily use very rigorous accounting principles so I’m trying to parse out the truth.”
The question then is how does he fact-check his information and make sure his sources are reliable?
“I’ve been covering the industry for long enough, where I know a few very trustworthy people I know will give me the truth,” he said.
Apart from establishing a baseline level of trust with a broad network of sources, Berke also prefers to refer to trade publications like Marijuana Business Daily and cannabis startups like Headset, for information as opposed to mainstream publications.
“While mainstream publications save for us [Business Insider], Politico and a few others cover the industry very well, a lot of the good coverage is in trade publications,” he said. “I do really trust that the information they’re putting out it’s unbiased and they have a lot of good data.”
On top of that, Berke believes that a diversity of sources is very important when covering this beat.
“A lot of business reporters fall in the trap where they’re just talking to like executives over and over again but you got to talk to employees too,” he said. “Also make sure sources are diverse in terms of race and gender.”
Furthermore, Berke believes that with New York being home to a lot of reporters, the legalization of cannabis will create a perception shift about the beat and what it means to be a good reporter on the beat.
“I would welcome a lot more reporters coming into this beat, competing with me and working with me,” he said. “I would absolutely love to see the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the other publications in the highest echelon of the industry take the industry seriously and have someone with specific domain expertise that is embedded.”
Berke believes that as more people demand coverage of what is going to be a multibillion-dollar industry, in-depth, widespread coverage from large mainstream publications is inevitable.
“In 10 years, I think a lot of publications are going to be scrambling because the industry is going to be worth $100 billion: bigger than the beer industry,” he said. “So I do think we need to get ahead of that rather than be reactionary once it’s already here.”
