Cannabis Journalist Jeremy Berke Shares the Importance of Social Media In Their Work

Jeremy Berke is a senior reporter for Business Insider where he focuses on the cannabis industry, particularly on cannabis business and policy. Ever since his start with Business Insider back in 2015, Berke covered politics, science, and finance before carving out his own niche as a marijuana journalist after creating the news publication’s cannabis beat.

Q: I’d like to learn a bit more about your journalism background and how you got started. So my first question is, Where did you study journalism?

A: Yeah, sure. So I actually didn’t, I didn’t study journalism in undergrad. So I actually studied environmental science and biology. Go figure, things change. After I graduated college, I wrote I just freelance didn’t have a job, a couple articles for a travel magazine, I was backpacking. And I parlayed that into a job at a small publication called Atlas Obscura, which is based here in New York.

I worked for them for about six months and then at that point, I felt like, what I thought was just gonna be a fun job. Well, I kind of figured out what I wanted to do with my life and turned it into fueling the fire to become a professional journalist. So from Atlas Obscura, I applied to the editorial fellowship program at Business Insider—got in luckily.

So I started a Business Insider in 2015, I covered a whole range of things. I started on the breaking news desk, so at that point is mostly covering, covering the run-up to the 2016 election, I quickly realized that experience, I didn’t want to be a political reporter, go figure.

Q: How did your path in journalism take you into covering the cannabis industry?

A: I wrote a one-off story about the cannabis industry in late 2016. And, you know, I had been interested in legalization—I consumed the product in college—I thought it was like an interesting social trend, but I never really thought it would become a full-time job, it was sort of early on the curve then. Once I wrote that one-off story, I got more feedback in my inbox and from sources than anything I’ve written previously. I felt like we kind of hit a nerve.

So one story, you know, became one story a week became two stories a week became 50% of my time. And I think at that point, you know, is right when Canada had legalized and 2018, people were really sort of thirsting for coverage of the cannabis industry as a, you know, a multibillion-dollar financial industry with publicly traded companies, investors and things like that, and be the sort of policy public health, social justice implications of cannabis legalization as well.

A lot of the coverage at the time was like, here are the 10 best bongs, which is cool, but it’s not something we want to cover, we want to cover it like a serious social change and a serious financial industry. From there, I pitched our higher-ups on making it a full-time beat.

And that kind of dovetails nicely with the launch of our subscription business, which means I write primarily behind the paywall. From there, it was sort of a little bit of an experiment to figure out like what our bread and butter coverage was, and we sort of landed on the beat, which I’m on now, which is very industry-focused, but with an eye towards social justice of change and all the issues that we care about a lot.

Q: When did you realize that social media was a helpful tool in your work as a journalist?

A: I’m 30 years old, right? So I grew up in the environment where journalism was never separate from social media and so I think if I was 10 years older, 15 years older, my answers would be a little bit different. But I grew up with social media, Twitter and LinkedIn especially. I’m less active on Instagram, it’s mostly for private.

Twitter and LinkedIn, especially, are really good ways to find sources. Oftentimes, Twitter is like a water cooler for the entire cannabis industry

I’m in these constant conversations where I’m finding information when I post a story, and people will give their immediate feedback. Sometimes it’s stressful and sometimes it’s really good that they have really constructive things to say. So that’s number one. I think I use it to find story ideas a lot and I use DM’s to talk to sources and in ways that are a little less casual than setting up a zoom or phone call or a coffee meeting or something like that.

With the rise of the creator economy, I think journalists are taking that very seriously. And I think social media platforms are a very good way to build an audience for what you’re covering, especially if you’re trying to make the case for coverage of something a little more niche like the cannabis industry.

I think it (social media) helped when I wanted to start covering it (cannabis). But I had already engaged followers who were in discussion with and an audience that was ready and willing to consume what I was producing.

So I think from the commercial directive, just the ability to build an audience and to speak directly to the audience to get feedback from it has been super, super helpful in my career, too. That answer is really twofold. It’s one, it’s a place to find sources, a place to find story ideas, a place to talk, that’s also a really good tool to build an audience that’s outside of the general distribution channels that, you know, more mainstream digital media or newspaper would afford a younger reporter.

Q: Do you feel like social media has been helpful and making Cannabis News more mainstream? And I guess acceptable?

A: I totally think so, especially in industries like cannabis or if you’re covering anything else that’s kind of emerging. There are a lot of what I’d say “non-journalism” people who are sharing news and creating Instagram accounts that share what they call scoops and breaking news and things like that. That’s all well and good, but I think people really look towards journalists from major publications to parse that out, and make sure that the information is vetted and rigorously reported. So I think that’s one thing.

Number two is just the access that you get on social media. Anybody can start a Twitter account and start writing about what they want to write about and sharing news or what they want to hear about. It just provides this broad pipeline of things that can be unfiltered, and that has downsides.

But generally speaking, I think it’s a useful way to connect with audiences and to create content that resonates with people.

Q: What do you like most about Twitter? And what do you like the least?

A: I think if you use Twitter intelligently, and you really curate your followers, your following lists and things like that, you can have these really immediate substantive conversations about topics, right?

Oftentimes, it’s very hard, especially during the pandemic, when everyone was at home, to sort of have these ongoing discussions. Twitter provided a really good outlet for that.

But the caveat there is you have to use it extremely carefully. I think Twitter, especially rewards, people who are playing to the lowest common denominator just based on the algorithm, right? Like if you want to manufacture outrage, Twitter is a very good way to do that. If you want to have a sensible, nuanced conversation about something you have to be really you have to use Twitter with a lot of intent to do that. I think there are upsides and downsides in terms of how you use the platform.

Q: Do you have a strategy when it comes to using Twitter? Like, do you have a set amount of tweets you want to put out? Or do you only want to cover the cannabis news?

A: There’s general rules you can go by if you don’t have a sort of programmatic social media strategy. One is not overdoing it. During the workday, if you’re tweeting more than 10–12 times, it’s probably too much. People don’t need to hear from you that much.

I also think the flip side is true, where if you’re not putting it off for a week, people are gonna forget about you. So you want to be able to use it enough, not too much.

There are certain things that I’ve tried to do more recently, like, I have stories that go up behind the paywall that I think have useful information for the public interest. So I try and sort of summarize them and tweet threads and things like that. And those get shared pretty widely, which I’m pretty happy about.

Q: Do you feel like social media has evolved into an essential tool that all journalists should be active on?

A: I would say yes and no. On the yes side, I think you are missing a key part of the ongoing conversation and whatever industry your beat you cover, if you’re not engaged on social media. It’s 2022, that’s just how people talk right, you are missing a key part of engaging with the public, which is what we do as journalists.

On the no side, it can be very much a distraction from what you’re actually reporting on. If you’re taking too many of your cues from what people are saying on social media, you might be missing some parts of reality. Sometimes you need to log off and go outside and talk to people. So I think that’s really important to keep in mind.

At the same time, you know, you’d be hard-pressed to find a journalist who’s, you know, not 65 years old that isn’t very active and engaged on social media. And I think that speaks volumes just about the reality and the power these platforms have.