DENVER — Ricardo Baca, veteran journalist and founder of award-winning news site The Cannabist, has joined mg Magazine as national cannabis columnist. Baca’s first column appears in the June 2018 issue, on newsstands now.
“We’re extremely pleased to have the opportunity to debut Ricardo’s column in mg magazine,” said editor-in-chief Tom Hymes. “As prognostications about the industry come face-to-face with reality over the coming months and years, we’ll need thoughtful voices to help guide the journey. Ricardo will surely provide one such voice, and we hope our readers appreciate engaging with him as much as we do.”
A 20-year veteran of daily newspapers including The Denver Post, Baca approached mg‘s editors about crowdsourcing the new column’s topical approach and subject matter. Instead of making the decision in an editorial vacuum, Baca and the mg team are asking the readers what burning issues occupy their minds.
Baca is prepared to delve into the trickiest cannabis conundrums of the modern world in the new column—from the industry’s looming commercialization to breaking down the many different cannabis markets across the country from Nevada to Colorado to D.C. In his first column, he encourages readers to reach out on Twitter (@bruvs) or email ([email protected]) with ideas for the kind of material they want to see every month.
As Baca writes in the current issue, “What a great experiment this could be! Writer and readers, ideating and conversing together to determine the direction of a column before the column gets started in earnest. What a triumph of modern technology and thoughtful communication this could be.”
When Baca founded groundbreaking site The Cannabist, he instituted multiple initiatives and columns based entirely on reader feedback—including a popular recurring column on at-home cultivation and an initiative that transformed The Cannabist Show into an audio-only podcast, thus expanding on its roots as a five-camera television production.
Since leaving The Denver Post in late 2016, Baca has grown into one of the legal cannabis industry’s most trusted thought leaders, using his training as a print journalist to create Grasslands, a journalism-minded public relations and communications agency serving highly regulated industries like cannabis, hemp and cryptocurrency.
The first column to reflect readers’ feedback will run in the August 2018 issue of mg.
