High Times Has Some Glossy New Competition (NewYorkTimes)
Print is dying but magazines about marijuana are thriving.
The cover of Gossamer’s debut issue features a mouthwatering imageof orange juice being poured into a glass dotted with beads of condensation. Inside there’s an article about books as home décor status items, a Q. and A. with the writer and director Janicza Bravo, and a fashion spread featuring the clothing lines of Rosetta Getty and Gabriela Hearst.
The magazine’s tag line and de facto motto, “High Quality,” is opaque enough to not raise any red flags to narcs, but also serves as a winking reference to its connective thread and defining subject matter.
Marijuana.
In Broccoli’s fourth and most recent issue, between advertisements for the cannabis body care brand Apothecanna and the weed delivery service Eaze, there’s a profile of the women who founded an “ungendered skatewear” brand and an advice column from Emily Post concerning how to “tactfully talk about weed.”
And at Miss Grass you’ll find a recipe for cucumber, tomato and CBD salad; a three-step how-to on rolling the perfect joint; and a guide to Los Angeles’s best cannabis-friendly attractions. Miss Grass’s slogan? “Welcome to the high road.”
“We wanted to create something that reflected how we engage with cannabis on a daily or weekly or monthly basis in our personal lives,” said Verena von Pfetten, who, along with David Weiner, started Gossamer magazine last year. “Everyone uses it for a different reason: to relax, to sleep, to have fun, to go out to dinner or on a hike. It’s about the experience you do after. It was important for us to create a lifestyle publication that sat between cannabis and all the other interests of the consumer.”
Read the full article in the NYTimes
A new generation of users are more likely to read Goop than High Times, the stoner bible, and publishers see an exciting opportunity in a marketplace that could reach $23.4 billion in consumer spending and employ a half-million Americans by 2023, according to the cannabis data firm BDS Analytics.
Print media is going up in smoke. Could weed, of all things, be its savior?
