Natural Allies: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Alt-Weeklies, Wellness and Cannabis

It speaks to the cultural weight of the humble alt-weekly that among all the countercultural totems celebrated in the 1996 musical Rent signature song La Vie Bohème—from yoga to yogurt to Lenny Bruce and Langston Hughes—that songwriter Jonathan Larson included The Village Voice. 

Founded in 1955, The Village Voice rose up as the first alternative newsweekly in the country, created by powerhouse writers and thinkers Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock and Norman Mailer. But throughout the midcentury, alt-weekly and underground newspapers proliferated not only in Manhattan, but from Ann Arbor to Antwerp. 

Midsize and major cities alike offered up alternatives to their daily paper of record, from Seattle’s The Stranger to Atlanta’s Creative Loafing to Chicago’s Reader. These publications blossomed with the 1960s counterculture, found momentum in the anti-war movement of the 1970s and were some of the first to cover the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s with empathy and nuance. 

Indeed, it’s hard to talk about the natural products sector, including cannabis and psychedelics, without talking about alternative news. As Paul Bass, editor and founder of the New Haven Independent explained to The New Journal,, alt-weeklies took off at a moment when the hippies who toked and protested their way through the ’60s grew a little older and a little more established—but hadn’t lost their countercultural ethos.

The Intertwined Rise of Alt-Weeklies and Natural Products, Including Cannabis

“The new alternative press reflected that,” said Bass. “They were still anti-military, they were still critical of the establishment, especially the media, and they were very pro-drugs, but they were more above ground and they made their money from restaurant ads and sex ads. Especially sex ads.”

That same set of conditions allowed the nascent natural products sector to proliferate during the same period. Hanna Kroeger founded New Age Foods in Boulder, Colorado just two years after The Village Voice launched, for instance. But natural grocers and organic foods didn’t find real momentum until the 1970s, when idealistic founders who came of age during the Summer of Love began to found companies like Tom’s of Maine, Bread and Circuses, Bob’s Red Mill and Celestial Seasonings. 

It was around the same time national publications like Life and Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The Wall Street Journal began covering the nascent natural foods movement. Meanwhile, journalist Dan Rather didn’t cover the wellness movement on 60 Minutes until the very end of the decade in 1979—just one year after the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) hosted its first convention in Seattle, Washington. 

The natural products and alternative weekly sectors found themselves on parallel trajectories again in the 1990s, when revenues were high and leadership teams were aging. A slew of M&A corporatized and consolidated independent media at the end of the millennium. 

The Village Voice, for example, acquired LA Weekly in 1994 and Seattle Weekly in 1997. In between, the Clinton administration greenlighted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, ushering in two decades of media acquisitions that have transformed the news industry.

Similarly, the success of the natural products sector throughout the 1980s made big food conglomerates like Kraft sit up and take note. While successful frontrunners like Whole Foods were purchasing competitors like Mrs. Gooch’s, Fresh Fields and Bread and Circus, there was a big round of buy ups by Big Food, including General Mills’s acquisition of Cascadian Farms and Small Planet Foods, Heinz’s purchase of Earth’s Best and the acquisition of Seeds of Change by Mars. 

The Place of Alt-Weeklies in the Contemporary Media Landscape

While the natural products industry has never been bigger, the same can’t be said for countercultural chronicles in the decades since Y2K. If they weren’t acquired by area dailies or publishing conglomerates, many alt-weeklies have become casualties of a massive contracture in the newspaper industry—and particularly in local media. 

As On the Media reporter Micah Loewinger noted in an interview with Tricia Romano, author of the cultural history The Freaks Came Out to Write, some of the papers lost just in the past few years include The Boston Phoenix, Urban Tulsa, Philadelphia City Paper, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Knoxville Mercury. San Francisco hasn’t had an alt-weekly since the SF Weekly ended its 40-year run in 2021, while the “legendary crusading liberal magazine” Texas Observer shuttered in 2023. Even The Village Voice ended print publication in 2017.

All is not lost, however. Publications like Portland, Oregon’s Willamette Week, Denver’s Westword, the The Austin Chronicle and the Cleveland Scene remain important sources of information about their respective cities’ food, music, film and art scenes. 

They also offer regular coverage of products and industry news like offbeat cannabis consumption spaces, the “Fresh Nugs of Bel Air” and the opening of the first Black-owned cannabis dispensary in New York City—as well as important award application opportunities like Westword’s Best Of Denver® 2024 and Las Vegas Weekly’s Best of Vegas.

Why Cannabis Brands and Wellness Brands Should Seek Earned Media With Alt-Weeklies

For wellness, natural products and cannabis brands, alt-weeklies offer a firm foundation for earned and paid media placements. There is often less need to persuade editors at alt-weeklies that cannabis products or independent local food brands are deserving of coverage than those at more traditional—and corporate—daily newspapers and mainstream magazines. They are also more likely to accept paid ads from cannabis brands, as long as they comply with state and local cannabis advertising rules, that is.

As DigBoston’s senior sales executive put it to Boston’s WBUR in 2019—about a year after Massachusetts dispensaries opened: “Marijuana's becoming a huge thing in Boston and Somerville and Cambridge, and people need a place to put these ads. Some places won't take them, but we will.”

Alt-Weeklies and Thought Leadership

Alt-weeklies are also a natural venue for thought leadership columns and op-eds that touch on local and state politics that national publications might find too niche to cover. For example, in 2020 Grasslands CEO and Founder Ricardo Baca wrote an open letter in Westword to then-mayor Michael Hancock arguing against the city’s initial decision to disinclude cannabis dispensaries from the list of essential services that could remain open during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A strong PR strategy will include a mix of different publications and media outlets that align with a brand’s target audience and publicity goals. If you’re wondering what to look for in a cannabis marketing agency or wellness PR partner, it’s one that will build credibility, brand recognition and momentum through placements at alt-weeklies and other local or regional publications. Those placements will help publicists ladder up to editors at papers and magazines with even bigger audiences. 

‍Ready to build your marketing and PR strategy? We’re always ready to talk through your brand’s unique needs and pain points to find a custom solution. But if you aren’t ready to start that conversation yet, check out our cannabis public relations services and cannabis marketing services to learn more about how we transform brands like yours with our proven process.