Co-founder and chief growth officer Martin Lane reflects on a year in which audience numbers soared, the Awards went stellar, and the publication rediscovered why it was started in the first place.
Purpose has been on my mind a great deal lately.
In the corporate world, many company leaders like to believe their larger purpose is to make a positive difference in the world, not just to deliver value to their shareholders.
Whether they achieve it is often open to question, but they have come to recognise it makes good business sense to be seen to try.
The evidence suggests they're right. According to a 2021 study by global communications group Havas, consumers are seeking brands that will make a meaningful difference – with 73% saying they must act now for the good of society and the planet.
Which brings me back to what we built here.
When we first started to workshop the idea for a dedicated media brand for the Australian and New Zealand cannabis industries in late-2019, my co-founder Kim McKay put together a deck outlining the problem we were trying to solve and how we might go about it.
With a background in public relations and marketing in music and travel, there's not much Kim doesn't know about helping brands connect with audiences, so it was instructive to see how she went about the task.
To the outsider, it might seem easy, but defining your purpose turns out to be an exhaustive process — one that takes a lot of research, creative thinking, and audience testing. It's almost as exhausting as delivering against it.
We eventually landed on ours – "to empower industry growth".
So, four years on, has it stood the test of time? Personally, I don't have any doubt that that's what we try to do every day — whether through our reporting, advocacy or events.
While we inevitably have to write about unethical behaviour by some in the industry, we try to balance that with stories about the vast majority who are delivering life-changing results for their patients.
And the whole raison d'être for the The Cannabis Observer Awards is to recognise the best in the business and shine a spotlight on the outstanding work which is helping the industry grow at such a rapid rate.
In a year when unique users hit a record 14,000 per month, we added another 1,200 members to our database, and the awards sold out again, we feel we must be doing something right.
But, judging by some of the emails we receive, there does seem to be a debate about our role in the sector.
Some urge us to "expose company x" for alleged breaches of the TGA's advertising regulations or other behaviour they deem not to be in the best interests of patients.
Others warn us they will "withdraw their support" if we write what they perceive to be negative stories about them.
So are we investigative journalists rooting out wrongdoing wherever we can find it? Or industry cheerleaders, only telling positive stories about the power of the plant?
In reality, we're both — and neither.
Our business model depends on charging a small fee for exclusive content — articles which chief correspondent Steve Jones uncovers via his contacts that you won't read anywhere else.
That can mean telling stories some people would rather keep to themselves, but we owe it to our paying audience to tell them.
As George Orwell wrote: "Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
When our content meets that definition, we always try to write it in a way which "empowers growth" — even stories about rogue behaviour offer pointers to how the industry can do better in the future.
But we are not the TGA or AHPRA and it is not our role to police the sector.
“Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
george orwell
Those urging us to expose other companies may have good reason to do so, but it may also be to their commercial benefit, and it's not always easy to separate genuine concern from malicious gossip.
Throw in Australia's punitive libel laws and it can be a minefield determining which is which.
We also have relationships to manage. It's a small industry, and even when we write a story which is inconvenient for a company boss, we still want them to answer the next time we call.
Where things can get complicated is when we run stories which get picked up — and sometimes misinterpreted — by the mainstream press.
Our coverage of industry issues including vertical integration, transparency, ease of access and the growth of a de-facto recreational market is sometimes used by other outlets as a stick to beat the industry with.
But we always seek out the writers of those articles to give context and advocate on behalf of the majority in the sector who are doing the right thing, and the patients who benefit as a result.
Our writer Hannah Adler wrote last year about the importance of engaging with mainstream journalists to persuade them of the benefits of the medicine, work we all need to do to make sure the sector gets a fair hearing.
It's something we do through gritted teeth at times though. We've had journalists from multimillion dollar media companies asking us to send them PDFs of our stories knowing they are likely to repurpose that content and monetise it by putting it behind their own paywalls.
That's where having a clear purpose helps with decision making. If we look through that lens, educating the public about cannabis is a price worth paying if it helps the industry grow.
Otherwise, what's the point?
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Year one: keeping the lights on
Year two: predicting a bright future
Year three: tantrums and tiaras
