AADL Talks To: Patricia Garcia and John Hilton, Ann Arbor Observer Co-Owners
When: June 6, 2024
In this episode AADL Talks To John Hilton and Patricia Garcia. John and Patricia co-own the Ann Arbor Observer, where Patricia is Publisher and John is Editor. John and Patricia talk about how they were selected for ownership, how the community has changed in their almost 40 years of covering it, and how they weathered the changes in the media industry and the pandemic.
Transcript
- [00:00:10] KATRINA ANBENDER: Hi. This is Katrina.
- [00:00:11] ELIZABETH SMITH: This is Elizabeth.
- [00:00:12] ELIZABETH SMITH: In this episode, AADL talks to John Hilton and Patricia Garcia. John and Patricia co-own the Ann Arbor Observer, where Patricia is publisher and John as editor. John and Patricia talk about how they were selected for ownership, how the community has changed in their almost 40 years of covering it, and how they weathered the changes in the media industry and the pandemic.
- [00:00:31] ELIZABETH SMITH: We'll just start out by asking what brought you each to Ann Arbor, and did you grow up here?
- [00:00:41] JOHN HILTON: I was like a lot of people, somebody who came to school here, and left only very briefly ever since. I was born in the UP and Marquette, came down to school here because my big sisters had both come here, and I was already familiar with the route. I've always loved to drive, and so I would sometimes be the one who'd drop them off and pick them up. I knew how to get to Main Street and up Hill Street to the co-op there and back to Steven's House where my oldest sister had been living, and then my next sister lived in Osterweil, which is at Jefferson and Division. That was how I came here, and I met my first wife in one of the student co-ops in Vail House on Lawrence Street. We were deeply involved in the co-op until we decided we'd put enough work into the co-op, and then we moved into an apartment on Cornwell Place, which has just been taken over by the university and vacated a little stub of a street by what was then St. Joe's Hospital. I told some of the story in the previous one, so I won't go all the way through it. But when Paula decided that she was not going to become an Asia librarian and travel the country finding a job, it was like, oh, well, what am I going to do here, and I think I told that story, but about how I'd fallen in love with the Observer that the first time I saw it, and so that became my focus, and it's been my focus ever since.
- [00:01:53] PATRICIA GARCIA: I moved to Ann Arbor in 1974 from Kalamazoo. Went to Kalamazoo College. Prior to that, I was originally from Grand Rapids, and '74 with my former husband. For the first few years that we lived in Ann Arbor, I was raising children, having babies and raising children, discovered the Observer, loved it, and applied for a part time sales position in 1983. Actually, I didn't even own a typewriter at the time, handwrote my resume and was hired for sales at the Observer, which is how I started.
- [00:02:32] KATRINA ANBENDER: You covered this a little bit, but I understand you both started at the Observer without any previous experience in journalism or publishing, so can you tell us what your first roles were, and then maybe a little bit more about what had compelled you to join it or decide to make that change in your life.
- [00:02:51] JOHN HILTON: Actually, just Patricia had asked to see the previous podcast, so I'd been through it, too, and I realized I told that story there too, which was that I was working in a Ford plant to pay for Paula's graduate school, which is great by the way. If you could have been a Ford worker in the '70s, it was just fabulous there. I've often said I owe everything I have to the Ford Motor company. But in any case, it was, I was working an afternoon shift, getting off at 4:30 in the morning, a 10-hour shift, and there was a Kroger store on the foot of Broadway at the time. One of the first places that the Hunts distributed their first issues of the Observer was at that Kroger. I stopped to shop on my way home, sometime probably 5:15, 5:30 in the morning after listening to the crop report on WWJ in Detroit. There was this wonderful magazine. It was just so compelling to me, the fact that they were informed, that they cared, that they wanted to understand the people and why things were happening in the community. Just a sense that I had and affectionate, but completely honest guide to life in the community, which is something I'd never seen in any publication before, and so I set my goal to be part of that once I realized I needed a job here in Ann Arbor.
- [00:04:01] PATRICIA GARCIA: My decision to join the Observer was really a fluke. I was ready to work. Two of my daughters were already in school. My youngest was in nursery school. I said, I would love to get a part time job. I had seen the Observer, really fell in love with it, saw an ad for part time advertising sales responded, and was hired. I walked into the office on my first day, I introduced myself. The receptionist said, well, go find a table. There's a phone and a phone book, start making calls, so I did. Gosh, about a year after that, maybe a little more than that, Don and Mary approached me about a new potential publication. They were discussing with the Chamber and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, which at that time were two separate organizations, This Month in Ann Arbor, and at that point, they asked if I would be willing to start working full time and help start that publication, which I did. It no longer exists. Shortly after John and I purchased the Observer in 1986, we decided to discontinue publication and focus on the Observer.
- [00:05:10] JOHN HILTON: Just to say that This Month in Ann Arbor was an attempt to reach people who are interested in Ann Arbor, but outside Ann Arbor. The Observer has always circulated in a gradually expanding definition of what Ann Arbor is. Now it's the entire Ann Arbor ZIP codes and the entire public school district. But there were a lot of people who were coming in, and so these groups wanted to have something that took pieces from what we were already doing for residents and distributed it more widely, and it was a good idea, but it was not one that was self supporting over time.
- [00:05:36] PATRICIA GARCIA: It wasn't financially viable.
- [00:05:38] ELIZABETH SMITH: How did your roles change over the years and your positions grow and progress?
- [00:05:43] PATRICIA GARCIA: Well, shortly after we initiated This Month in Ann Arbor, Don approached me and asked if I would be willing to learn more about the business side of the Observer. We sat down and chatted. He showed me the spreadsheets, explained. At that time, he was working with his father on some of the financial planning and strategy. I was very interested. I was flattered, and I began a new full time position at the Observer as Associate Publisher.
- [00:06:14] JOHN HILTON: I started out freelancing. My first freelance article was published in September of 1980, and the Observer was growing rapidly at that time. The Hunts had made a very bold move. They had started out distributing by what's called bulk drop, where the stands like the one that I had found by the Kroger store. They would just leave them there and people would pick them up, and they actually mortgaged their farm down in Southern Ohio to start mailing it to all the single family homes in the city. As a result, they had dealt themselves into a duopoly with the Ann Arbor News, which previously was the only real way to reach a large piece of the Ann Arbor market, and the publication was just growing and growing. In fact, that would have been right about the time that my first article was published. I saw an ad taking a staff writer, and I actually called Don and said, Don, I just have bought a house. I really can't afford to give up my job now, but if this is the only way to keep writing for the Observer, I will take that job. He said, no, that's all right, there'll be opportunities. Two years later, there was an opportunity that coincided because by that point, it was '82, we were in the second part of a double dip recession, and I was the low person in the Wayne Assembly Plant. Actually, the Wayne Assembly Plant, Michigan truck plat complex, which must have been 8,000 people or more. Nobody had less seniority than me and was still working. At that point, Don said, would you like to be a staff writer. I said, oh, yes, please, and so I left Ford to be a writer there, although there was an interesting slight delay where the article that Don had wanted me to write about the inside story of being a Ford worker was published while I was still a Ford worker. That led to some interesting back and forth, but fortunately, there was not a very large cross section of the people at the Wayne Plant and the people who read the Observer. Then I've been there ever since.
- [00:08:03] KATRINA ANBENDER: Can you walk us through the change in ownership and when and how that came about?
- [00:08:08] PATRICIA GARCIA: Oh, gosh. Early in, maybe it was spring of 1986, Don and Mary approached us individually, I think first, and asked if we might be interested in purchasing the Observer. We were flabbergasted, of course. We had no idea they were interested in selling. We immediately called one another to chat and said, let's find out more about what the opportunity is and see if we can move it forward. We talked to each other. We talked to Don and Mary. We wanted to make sure that we shared our values and our mission with the company, and we knew we had to come up with some cash to purchase the company. We also knew we needed a loan. I believe, John, correct me if I'm wrong, but you needed to go to a second hand store and get a sport goat and apply for our loan [John: meeting the bankers] with the bankers. I believe we applied for loans at two or three different institutions. But when we met with Cliff Sheldon, who is a retired banker in the community, well known husband of Ingrid Sheldon, former mayor, he responded immediately and said, you've got the loan. First of America at the time, gave us the loan, and we talked and wanted to be really clear about what our roles and responsibilities were. We knew even as young as we were that partnerships are difficult and challenging, and we were concerned about how the staff would respond to new ownership. We wanted to be really clear about what our responsibilities were, what our roles were, and how we were going to address the staff with the ownership change. At that time, we decided, and I think it was probably the best decision we ever made, that John would be responsible for the editorial decisions, I would be responsible for all the business decisions. When we came to an impasse or disagreed, John had the final call on an editorial issue, and I had the final call if it was a business issue, and that's worked out very well for over 40 years.
- [00:10:20] JOHN HILTON: Coming up on.
- [00:10:21] PATRICIA GARCIA: Coming up 40 years. It's been a great journey for me, at least, and I don't want to speak for John.
- [00:10:28] JOHN HILTON: No. I could not have imagined a better life.
- [00:10:32] KATRINA ANBENDER: They reached out to you two specifically, had you worked together or had a working relationship prior to that?
- [00:10:41] JOHN HILTON: Not at all.
- [00:10:42] PATRICIA GARCIA: It was a completely arranged business marriage, actually.
- [00:10:48] JOHN HILTON: The only missing element there that I think I maybe have shared with you once in passing is that Don had been very restless, Don and Mary had both been very restless. The emblematic interaction, which is still told by Patrick Queen, who was one of the managing editors in the past there was that Mary came out of a meeting with somebody on staff just fuming and saying, "He said I wasn't a good manager. I never wanted to be a good manager." They were really restive because they had done it all themselves. But as it had grown, they needed other people, and then they were finding themselves in a role that was not one they wanted to be. Don had been talking for ages about trying to get out and selling, and I couldn't see anybody anywhere doing something like the observer that I wanted to see owning the observer. At one point, I had actually said to Don, if you really feel you must sell the observer, let me know and I'll see how much money I can borrow. That was preface, I think, to why I was the editorial person who was approached on that and I was really glad I did.
- [00:11:56] PATRICIA GARCIA: John and I had met very briefly and casually at an occasional staff meeting, had never had a serious conversation so it was definitely arranged by Don and Mary. He saw John's extraordinary talent with writing and editing, and I had really moved the organization ahead financially with sales and financial oversight.
- [00:12:22] KATRINA ANBENDER: Had their partnership been split in a similar way, or was it more mixed?
- [00:12:27] JOHN HILTON: It was more mixed.
- [00:12:27] PATRICIA GARCIA: I think that was the problem.
- [00:12:31] ELIZABETH SMITH: Are your roles similar to that you mentioned it was pretty much unchanged? Have the tasks of ownership changed over the years?
- [00:12:37] PATRICIA GARCIA: Only to the extent that our staff has changed, and you need to adjust based on the people that you're working with, and also the industry has changed substantially. Wow. That's been a difficult challenge. As you well know, there are a lot of changes in the industry, and we are fortunate to still be in business. The community has supported us for so many years, and we're grateful for that support.
- [00:13:04] JOHN HILTON: It may be jumping ahead. I'm sure this will come to a question later, but actually, the last time I did interview, we were just going into the great recession. That was pretty devastating. At that point, we had been traditionally selling about 1,000 ad pages a year, and we dropped down below 700 ad pages a year. That's the scale of the reduction. At that point, we had our first layoffs. It was a really traumatic time for everybody. But we also felt that it was a sound business that there was a future for it, and we took pay cuts, some other people took pay cuts, and we got through that, and we really rebuilt that not to that same level we'd been, but to a good stable level. Then, of course, we had the pandemic.
- [00:13:44] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about the addition of the Community Observer. That was early on, I think, when you took over ownership. Is that still a publication that you maintain?
- [00:13:53] JOHN HILTON: We started that actually as a version of our City Guide, our annual City Guide was one of the first things we introduced when we took over. Then we had been expanding our coverage area for the Observer, but it seemed like we had reached the natural limits of people who consider themselves part of Ann Arbor. Do your kids go to the Ann Arbor Schools? Do you have an Ann Arbor address? Probably, yes. If you have a Dexter address, go to the Dexter schools, go to the Saline schools, probably not. The ad staff really wanted to reach again, these nearby communities. We thought we really had to have a dedicated publication. So we started out with what we called the Community Guide Chelsea, Dexter, and Saline. Then that grew enough that we did it twice a year and then we thought, we can do this four times a year, ran it quarterly, so we'd have three editions of the Community Observer and one Community Guide that also had some current news content in it. But that did not really survive the pandemic.
- [00:14:43] PATRICIA GARCIA: The pandemic really changed everything. The sales staff did an amazing job with sales for the Community Observer and the Community Guide. But once the pandemic hit, we knew we would not be able to continue the publication. Unfortunately, we've had a lot of readers, prior readers, let us know how disappointed they were that we weren't able to do it. Of course, we cannot increase the circulation of the Observer to deliver in those areas as much as we'd like to because we wouldn't have the financial revenue to be able to support that additional printing and distribution.
- [00:15:19] JOHN HILTON: We're right back where we started. We do one annual a community guide in the fall of each year.
- [00:15:24] KATRINA ANBENDER: Then you also do the Art Fair Guides as well.
- [00:15:27] PATRICIA GARCIA: We did.
- [00:15:28] KATRINA ANBENDER: Did. Okay.
- [00:15:29] PATRICIA GARCIA: We did.
- [00:15:30] JOHN HILTON: Yeah. Long story.
- [00:15:34] PATRICIA GARCIA: We won't bore you with the details, but as it turns out, it was a good thing that we stepped away. The art fairs decided to publish their own guide. That gave us the opportunity to focus more on the Observer a few years ago. I think that happened probably at least 10 years ago.
- [00:15:48] JOHN HILTON: Might be even 15.
- [00:15:51] KATRINA ANBENDER: You talked a little bit about staffing and management as being part of the job. Obviously, having a successful magazine means hiring talented people. Can you talk a little bit about what you've looked for when you're hiring writers or cover artists, designers, and you work with a lot of freelance as well.
- [00:16:10] JOHN HILTON: Yes, we do, and in fact, more than we have in the past. You'll be talking at some point to my wife, Eve Silberman, and she was our last staff writer outside the calendar. We have three people working on the calendar, one full time and two part time. But Eve was the last staff writer and actually, I had been a staff writer before I became editor. But that was one of the adaptations we had to make during the great recession was that we became more reliant on freelancers. What I look for, I was just actually going over this with Brooke Black, our deputy editor. It's a very simple rule when somebody approaches me with a story. Is it happening in Ann Arbor? Is it true? Is it interesting? It's really a very much seat of the pants rule. There's no standard formula for what will be a good Observer story. I just had lunch a couple of days ago with Marsi Parker Darwin, who lives out in the country out beyond Chelsea. Actually, she's quite near where the Hunts used to live in Waterloo. I was saying, I've been through this neighborhood before. Just out of the blue, a couple of months ago, I got this email. I don't think I was aware of the existence of Darwin's Eden, the place that she shares with her husband, the repair person of old style pinball machines, and all sorts of custom—fascinating. She showed me some of his work. It's like, this is cool, and also stained glass. But I had never been in touch with her at all. It was this amazing story about her brother who lived a life of mental illness and homelessness and who came to be with her in her last years. It was like, this is just a quintessential Observer story that nobody would ever have thought . I would never have thought to ask for this. But it speaks to so many things that are part of the world that we live in. What is it like to try to deal with mental illness when there's no really good treatments for it? What's it like to live a life as a homeless person, where—I loved the detail that her brother, Eric had bought a book on how to panhandle. He said, "It's a good book, some good tips, but they're completely wrong about how you can make $200 a day." It was this wonderful insight into this whole world. It was just like, it's not something that I would ever have put on a list of things I hoped to have, because I would never have imagined it existed.
- [00:18:23] PATRICIA GARCIA: Beautifully written.
- [00:18:25] JOHN HILTON: Beautifully written. Really, that comes down to what I think impressed me about the Observer from the first, which is the stories can be anything that's happening in Ann Arbor. But the common thread is it's somebody who's caring about Ann Arbor and thinking about Ann Arbor. That's really the common denominator. I realized, too, again, I was going back through that earlier podcast that I'd gone through this whole rigamarole trying to impress the Hunts before I approached them about freelance writing about trying to sell a national article. All they cared about was, well, what would you like to write about for us? What story do you have? That's really the way it's gone. There are people who have written 100 stories for me and people who've written one story for me, and it all depends on what they're interested in, what they have to share. So I have a very open mind about who could write for the observer and what about. Those are the three rules still. It's been wonderful to work with the range of people that I've worked with and to share these stories, because we all need to make sense of our environment. That was what the Hunts were doing from the beginning that impressed me so much. I've grown up in a small town where I had no idea how the town functioned, economically, culturally, and for a while, actually, someone who'd lived in Ann Arbor had started an Observer-like publication in Marquette and that was great while it lasted. But then she moved on to Wisconsin and became a mayor at Rhinelander, so these things come and go. But it's just been an absolute joy, how many people have things they want to share about their community. Actually, I was quoting this to Marsi, that I saw this recently said, of course, I've now forgotten who said it, but there's a feeling that people want to be liked. What they really want is to be understood, and that's what the Observer has always offered. For example, this piece that I just wrote for the Observer, it almost killed me. I didn't have time to write a feature, but it's a great opportunity, and I knew I could tell the story better than anyone else about Jeff Hauptman and the Oxford Companies and his plan to build more housing down in the Briarwood area. That was a story that just fell into my lap because it was so obviously Ann Arbor centric. But I said to them, we do have to talk about the difficulties in the commercial real estate business, because that's what you're in, and people are going to wonder. They said, sure. That's the deal. Again, because of that, I had a story that I was really glad to be able to tell. I'd be glad to do something short about this ambitious plan, but to tell the bigger story of commercial real estate and how he's hoping that they will interact together the residential and the commercial. It made more sense of what they're going to try down around the 777 Building, and hopefully, we'll try all the way through just the Briarwood area. I knew they were big, but the idea that they alone controlled enough sites just in the Briarwood area to build 10,000 apartments. It's like, wow.
- [00:21:27] PATRICIA GARCIA: Pretty incredible.
- [00:21:29] ELIZABETH SMITH: John, you've mentioned in the past in the interviews that we keep mentioning, that most of your articles are typically brought by writers. Do you now have a list of topics that you would like covered more than you have in the past, or is most of your content still delivered by writers?
- [00:21:46] JOHN HILTON: I still have an ideas list. I go over with people probably every week. I'm going to sit down with Eve at some point and say, I need a couple of upfronts for the July issue. Do any of these appeal to you? I've actually got my daughter working on one for the July issue because she happened to have expertise in an area that I wondered about. Did you get to the Art Fair's opening event, Patricia? Did I miss you there?
- [00:22:08] PATRICIA GARCIA: No.
- [00:22:08] JOHN HILTON: That's right.
- [00:22:10] PATRICIA GARCIA: Knight's briefly, yes.
- [00:22:11] JOHN HILTON: Yes. Okay.
- [00:22:13] JOHN HILTON: The most interesting detail I picked up there is that the new overall sponsor for the Art Fairs is Eli Lily, the drug maker. How did this happen? As it happened, I had a little bit of insight into it because I had gone back and forth when they were promoting the first appearance at the original fair. They had these big red buses parked outside of Hill Auditorium. I'd said this is a detail that we can find a way to share and get people there, and I'd actually gone and check to see if I qualified for a clinical trial on my tremor, [LAUGHTER] which I didn't. But as it happened, my daughter had previously worked at a job at Michigan Medicine, where one of her responsibilities was each morning she would troll through in her words, the census of newly admitted patients, looking for anybody they could recruit for a clinical trial, because the need for people at clinical trials is so great. I said, Kate, would you like to write about how this confluence of, there's a lot of people here. There's a lot of money here, came together. I assigned her that one but I've got a list of story ideas, and she actually ran through it and I said, well, that's a good one, but we actually have it in this issue. I share that on a reading basis with a lot of people. Sometimes people take things quickly and sometimes they take them not at all because I don't want to tell someone to be interested in something they're not interested in. I've dealt with professional writers who say, I can write well about anything. I said, probably, but if you don't really care about it let's find something you do care about.
- [00:23:37] KATRINA ANBENDER: When someone opens the observer, there are a lot of features that they know to expect. They have the crime map, the home sales, the calendar, Ann Arborites. Can you talk about how that structure developed? Maybe what changes to that were made under your ownership?
- [00:23:53] JOHN HILTON: Most of the changes came from the Hunts. Most of the concepts were originally developed by the Hunts. A lot of what we've carried forward goes back to what they had in mind. They invented the term the Ann Arborites, for example. They used the term Then and Now for the historical pieces. The biggest changes we've made have been to going to shorter formats. People will look at the old issues and say, boy, those were big features back. Then I said, we used to have 11 column features, even 13 columns. There are four columns to one of our big pages. That gives you a sense of how far they would run probably four or five spreads two page spreads when you open the magazine.
- [00:24:28] PATRICIA GARCIA: Readers are so used to catching quick bits of information digitally now. We had to adjust accordingly.
- [00:24:35] JOHN HILTON: We now have features as short as three columns, seven is much more typical and we have the shorter news departments up in the front. We have the upfront, and we have the inside Ann Arbor. Basically, I was trying to increase access to our calendar because it's such a wealth of information but on the other hand, it's a wealth of information. We created the events at a glance on the back page where people get some of the highlights easily. Then because they're facing the same space constraints that we've been describing here in terms of reduced economic support, the event's editors very ingeniously came up with concentrating like events so that they wouldn't be listed in the daily listings, but now, for example, the nice spots are all together, and so you don't have to say The Ark and the address and the phone number for every event. Then we have the seniors, and we have children, and we have films. By concentrating those, we saved a lot of space. In fact, I was just responding to a reader who said, are those online in that format? I thought no, they're not, but maybe they should be. I sent a note to the events editor saying, can you check with our online people to see if that's something that we can achieve. That was essentially really it. The essence of what the Hunts were doing is still what we're trying to do. It's what we've always wanted to do. I've often said, I never wanted to be in business, but I never wanted to see the Observer go away and this was the deal and placer.
- [00:25:59] PATRICIA GARCIA: We both still feel that way. We're going to hang in there as long as the community continues to support the observer.
- [00:26:06] JOHN HILTON: It's been really impressive how Danielle Robillard Jones and Courtney Sidor have done at bringing our sales back post pandemic.
- [00:26:14] PATRICIA GARCIA: My goodness. You had asked about staff earlier. We've been very fortunate to work with some extremely dedicated, talented, and smart people. I worked closely with the administrative and sales staff. We had a sales executive that had been with us for over 30 years. Our business manager have been with us for over 30 years. They both retired when the pandemic hit. But our staff really stepped up, as John mentioned, Courtney and Danielle have been phenomenal with ad sales and maintaining and building new relationships with new businesses in the community. Julie is also on the sales staff. She's been with us since 1987 and has continued the relationships that she's built over the years. We've been fortunate to work with some pretty dedicated individuals.
- [00:27:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: You've had a lot of classified ads over the years, a lot of personal ads. Are there any that stand out in your mind?
- [00:27:15] PATRICIA GARCIA: Not recently. We have discontinued our classifieds. Our personals at one time, they probably were four pages of personals in the issue, people, our readers, loved the personals classifieds. In fact, John mentioned in the earlier podcast, our relationship with Jay Forstner, who has been our fake ad launch person. It was his idea to begin with, and he has continued writing all the fake ads for many years. He and his wife met through the personals and every once in a while, I'll be out and about at a social event or an event in the community. Someone will whisper to me, my husband and I met through the Ann Arbor personals, which it's a good feeling to know that we've influenced our readers in that way in a very personal way. That's changed through the years, too, but we have great memories.
- [00:28:10] KATRINA ANBENDER: Speaking of the fake ads. You have a number of little quirkier features with the fake ads and iSpy. Are these something that also existed during the Hunts? Can you talk a little bit about how those have developed?
- [00:28:25] JOHN HILTON: The iSpy is similar to something that previously existed under the Hunts. A guy named Bob Reck had done something called the Test of the Town. Then Bob as people do moved on, and that had lapsed even before we took over. Then as things will happen, somebody who was new in town and was interested in writing for us—not writing for us, but contributing to us. Sally Bjork got in touch and said that she would be interested in doing something like that. She's done that ever since. That's actually, you were just communicating about how at the community book festival, we're hoping that Sally can be there to actually sell some of her books, and we'll have because we published a collection of iSpy highlights from Spy and highlights from the fake ad. We've got these books now that we actually one of the ways we kept the staff busy during the pandemic, actually, because suddenly we had dropped something like what two thirds of our advertising base, something like that.
- [00:29:18] PATRICIA GARCIA: It was extreme. We all start—learned how to work remotely at that point.
- [00:29:23] JOHN HILTON: It was a real challenge, obviously to figure out. What do we do? We don't want to lay people off even we were committed to continuing to publish, and we basically just ignored our ad ratio for a while. But then we still had time on people's hands and I said, let's do these books. That's how they came to pass. Now we have to actually get around to still selling them because we haven't sold out that first printing yet. But Jay was truly inspired coming up with that idea, and it's people are still amazed and still discovering it for the first time, which is great fun to see. There's been a big emphasis in publications on contests and reader engagement, and we just happen into those two ways of doing it. But those are very faithful readers who are very engaged in them, and are always it's month by month. I see the same people, I see new, small world, Patricia, that I tell you that I know the new receptionist at Helix Steel, our tenant.
- [00:30:20] PATRICIA GARCIA: Yes. Amy.
- [00:30:22] JOHN HILTON: Because she's from my hometown from Marquette and grew up down the street, actually. She's the age of my younger brother, so she's about a dozen years younger. But she's now the receptionist there. I we knew that we were both in town because I saw her entering the fake ad contest, and I would sometimes respond to something and she would say, are you the same Hiltons that used to live on Spruce Street in Marquette and I said, yes, we are. It was really funny to say, I walked in there, and the business manager at Helix said, we've got a new receptionist who says she knows you. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:30:53] PATRICIA GARCIA: Helix Steel is the company that leased space in our building. During the pandemic, we learned how to work remotely. Most of our staff continues to work remotely, and we needed to lease our building in order to have some revenue coming in. The building is owned by an LLC that John and I we purchased the building in foreclosure. We got a great deal, and remodeled. But it took three years, but we finally found a wonderful tenant, and person that John is referencing, works as the receptionist in the front office for Helix. We still occupy a small amount of space in the back of the office space, and we're trying to figure out how to clean that out.
- [00:31:37] KATRINA ANBENDER: With the fake ads, what have the reactions been from real advertisers? Have you ever had a funny reaction from them?
- [00:31:44] PATRICIA GARCIA: Occasionally, we do. Someone will contact a legitimate advertiser, thinking it's the fake ad. But, as John mentioned in the prior podcast, it's a good thing because they've received a call from someone who can learn a little bit more about their business. Nothing really negative at all. It's all been a very positive experience. The wonderful thing about the fake ad is that it prompts it motivates our readers to look at all the ads, which was brilliant.
- [00:32:17] KATRINA ANBENDER: Has there ever been an instance where anybody has failed to identify the fake ad or to locate the spy?
- [00:32:24] JOHN HILTON: Never.
- [00:32:25] JOHN HILTON: The iSpy is more difficult. Sometimes it's in single digits but, the fewest fake ad successful spottings is probably in the high double digits close to 100 or so.
- [00:32:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: In 2009, we spoke with John, and Ann Arbor News was just going through its change going online. How has the Observer changed since we last talked to you 15 years ago, and how has the Observer changed with the Ann Arbor News coverage decreasing?
- [00:32:52] JOHN HILTON: We've suffered from the same things that they suffered. We made a different decision. They made this leap of faith that there was online revenue. Even then, we'd been online for probably a dozen years, and we knew that there was not much online revenue to be had.
- [00:33:05] PATRICIA GARCIA: We actually were the first publishing company in the region to jump online and launch a website. At the time, a lot of our advertisers saying, what's a website? What are you talking about? But we knew after that many years that it wasn't going to make the observer financially viable.
- [00:33:24] JOHN HILTON: Yeah, it was a hope for outcome, and, I sure wish for everybody's sake, for the community's sake, that it had turned out that there was enough revenue online to support news gathering. There really is not, you know, my theory is, and it's really just a theory I've never tested it is that the price point for online advertising is set by people who pay nothing for content. It's set by the Facebooks, it's set by the Googles, and we provide the content. It's been a very difficult situation to see people try to make a go of it there. It took us a dozen years after we first went online before we had made enough money on it to expand to include our articles. We initially went online with the things that were most data-centered, our calendar and our city guide, because they obviously respond well to an online search. We added articles and we'd be, having a structure where articles go online during the course of the month. We don't make the entire issue available to, free until at the start of the month. Basically, if you're a paid subscriber, yes, you have full online access. But everybody else articles will go on here and here and here and here one at a time. That's worked well, because the print has in fact been our primary source of revenue. We also have a little dribble of revenue from ticket sales through an E-ticket system that we got involved with system. That's something that we're not sure whether it can build or whether it's going to just stay there because some people like to just buy the tickets, and if they buy a ticket through us, then they'll get a link on our website directly to ticket sales on a2tix, which is handy, and we'll highlight their listing in the events calendar. We've been trying to figure out what online revenue opportunities there are for us, and this one, a2tix was one that was actually created by a publication in Grand Rapids, and seemed like a good thing, but then they sold out, and it's now in the hands of people who have a different model, and we're not sure to what extent, it's something that we can successfully sustain and grow, but, it does fit for what it's worth, and this is aside from what we're talking about here. But as far as I can see, the only people who are making money online are people who get between a buyer and their purchase. We're not going to set up an Ann Arbor retailer and do that. But there's just nothing like the calendar in terms of its comprehensive listing of everything that's happening. I just met somebody yesterday who was telling me how much he appreciated as a newcomer to Ann Arbor to this guide to everything that's there, and we've heard that as long as we've been doing it. It's by far our biggest single editorial investment in terms of space. It probably takes up about half the editorial space in the magazine. In terms of staff, as I said, we've got three people working on that, whereas, we have really just, me and Brooke working on the other editorial.
- [00:36:09] PATRICIA GARCIA: We've maintained our circulation, too, because that's the major selling point for our advertisers. The businesses want to reach everyone in the community. With a 53,000 circulation and double that readership, because based on our readership surveys, we understand there are at least two people reading each issue. We've got over 100,000 readership in the area, which is a great advertising sales opportunity. As expensive as that is, it's a huge part of our financial expense, but we feel it's necessary in order to maintain our relationships with our advertisers.
- [00:36:48] JOHN HILTON: Just one summary on that too, we talked about how with ad sales growing and falling, the issue sizes have changed. The commitment I've always made is that we will have an interesting issue in whatever size the ads will support, and that's really the way we've gone about it is to say, okay, this is how much space we can give to the calendar. This is how much space we have for features and for the front of the book. That's really been our business model, too, is that because it is ad supported, it's as simple as a spreadsheet that I dropped the ad pages total into, and that tells me, okay, if you have 60 ad pages, you'll have 30 editorial pages, you'll have a 92 page issue, and then we make a good issue in that space.
- [00:37:27] KATRINA ANBENDER: I'm curious, you've provided a lot of local history coverage over the years with the Then and Now column. Are you still finding new topics to cover in that or are there stories that you revisit after a set amount of time? Maybe there's more to add to it?
- [00:37:41] JOHN HILTON: We do revisit things. The stories, of course, then now moves forward in time. Because it's really what that you're looking at now has an interesting back story, something that either looks the same, but has changed its use or that has changed entirely at its appearance, but there was something there once that would be interesting to note in terms of how the community came to be. We will sometimes revisit for sure, and, of course, with the Bicentennial, we're going back and looking at things, and, of course, we really appreciate too all that the library is doing. It's really wonderful to see, I was going to say, too, that's one of the things that's been fun to cover is the library itself, the growth and then, the whole rebirth of the library, the regeneration of the system, the expansion into things like podcasting. I think that was our most recent AADL story. It's become a true broad resource in the community, and that's wonderful to see.
- [00:38:31] PATRICIA GARCIA: As we've downsized, I believe we shared our library with you, our archive issue library and I was so glad that it went to a good home. We didn't have the space for it anymore and you have, I believe, digitized all of the history, all of the features and stories that we've shared through the years. Thank you.
- [00:38:51] KATRINA ANBENDER: Yes, it made it easy for us to research for this. Because we now have all of those online.
- [00:38:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: Are there any features that really made a personal impact on you, either ones that were written by other people or something that was published that really received a lot of feedback from your audience?
- [00:39:07] PATRICIA GARCIA: Do you want to tell the story of what was happening when the year that we purchased the observer? The litigious—
- [00:39:14] JOHN HILTON: The litigious landlord. In that fact, I think that was what I suspect Don saw that as a pretest about whether I could function as editor? There was a landlord in town who was at best not appreciated by a lot of his tenants, and been writing the marketplace changes column. I'd been sort of bumping into stories involving this. Don asked me whether I thought there was an interesting story there, and I said, yes, but he will sue us if we write it. Scott Sugar had written an article about them talking about the tenants' discontent in the way in which they felt exploited by leases that differed in some ways from what they were told they were signing, and so Don brought me in essentially to try to prepare it for litigation. He set up a meeting with Lee Bollinger, who's now the President of Columbia, but at the time was the Dean of the Law School and worked in First Amendment issues. We had a good talk about what is and is not actionable. What is opinion based on stated facts? What is a protected area of reporting? It became clear that we needed to refocus this story not just on people being unhappy with him but his extended record of litigation. The article came out as The Many Lawsuits of Doctor Gale and sure enough, he sued us.
- [00:40:32] PATRICIA GARCIA: Knew it was coming when we bought the business that we anticipated a lawsuit.
- [00:40:38] JOHN HILTON: Unfortunately, we had an excellent attorney who got us priority in discovery. Should you ever be sued? You want priority in discovery? Because it meant that Glen Gale, the landlord, had to sit down and be questioned by our attorney before we had to sit down and be questioned by his attorneys, and the day that he was supposed to do that, he settled. The settlement was that we would agree on an independent third party who would review the article, make a judgment about whether there were any inaccuracies in what they were, and we would publish the result. We reached that agreement, we submitted our proposed, reviewers. They were rejected by Dr. Gale and his attorneys, and we have now been waiting for 38 years for their list of people to review the article, so that was an interesting one.
- [00:41:24] PATRICIA GARCIA: Haven't had many suits, but those that we have. It's very memorable.
- [00:41:28] JOHN HILTON: Yeah, and then more recently, we had the situation of the doctors who had built a dream home and then had found themselves in litigation with almost everybody who was involved at its construction, and we became aware of them through an Observer ad. There was an ad, I probably a quarter page, horizontal, something like that. A story of trust and betrayal, referring people to a website in which they lit in at great length to everybody who had worked with them on this project, who they believed had conspired against them, including their builder, their lender, their architect, their title company and the mother of one of the couple. They were also conspiring with Russian intelligence. The FBI should be taking interest in this, it was quite a story. That story, too, became essentially a story of litigation, and needless to say, they sued us, and it was fascinating to see because they essentially did it all themselves. They just cut and pasted things out of the website complaining allegations about this conspiracy that they believed had formed against them. I remember going through, I think there were, like, 132 points in the lawsuit that I had to go through one by one by one with our attorney and respond to them all. Eventually, that too reached a point where someone had to basically put up or shut up and they had actually sued us. They put us in part of a big suit in Michigan against all these other people. Then they dropped that suit, and then they filed a new federal suit against us in California.
- [00:43:06] PATRICIA GARCIA: Meant a flight to California.
- [00:43:07] JOHN HILTON: Which meant a flight to California. It reached the point where it was before a judge and we had a settlement conference, so I flew out there for the settlement conference, and their settlement proposal was that we should remove that article and subsequent articles we'd written about them from our website, and they would drop the case. I flew to California to say no, and they didn't ever drop the case. They simply stopped pursuing it, but that was a fascinating. There are some interesting people in this world. The way some people think is a very interesting thing. But that was a case where I was very glad that Patricia had kept up our libel insurance policy.
- [00:43:45] PATRICIA GARCIA: I never miss a payment on our libel insurance.
- [00:43:47] JOHN HILTON: We tried not to ever use it, but that feeling that you can write about people like Dr. Gale, or you can write about the doctors without being intimidated, was really important. Thank you, Patricia for sticking with me through that.
- [00:44:00] PATRICIA GARCIA: Of course. We had one other lawsuit from a writer who sued us over one of our ads, actually. The ad included some text from a restaurant review that this gentleman had written about this restaurant and published in another publication. I had called the publication, asked if they had owned the copyright, if they had permission to give us to reprint, republish that text from the restaurant review, and they said, yes. We ran the ad, received a letter call, I don't remember which from the actual writer suing us for publishing a portion of his restaurant review. As it turns out, the publication did not have the right to give us permission. The writer had the copyright and, of course, had not given me that accurate information. We had a large payoff to the writer. We're very respectful of our writers and our artists in terms of their copyright ownership. We're very careful about that. I have that conversation with our advertising staff. Always, when an ad comes in, you've got a question, who did the photograph? Where did that photograph come from? Who wrote the text to make sure that we don't end up in a similar situation.
- [00:45:22] JOHN HILTON: It was very educational.
- [00:45:24] KATRINA ANBENDER: You've been covering Ann Arbor for almost 40 years. How has the community changed and how has the audience changed in that time?
- [00:45:34] JOHN HILTON: Boy, that's a long conversation. Obviously, politically, when we started, there were still two parties in town. Control of city council swung back and forth between Republicans and Democrats. We saw that change in the 1990s when elections were shifted from spring to coincide with the fall elections. That was an ingenious step by Democrat Dave DeVarti, who himself had his own publication in town, Current Magazine. To get student voters who showed up to vote Democratic in the fall to vote in local elections, and that eroded the existence of Republicans over the next 15 years, and they've been extinct as a operational force, it's probably 20 years now. But then we had factions within the Democratic Party, as will happen. People do disagree about things. That's been fascinating to watch. I often tell people that one reason we don't do editorials is that we don't really know that much. We are always surprised by things changing the way they have. I've been at it long enough to see the tone of attitudes toward development, for example, going from developers or bad people who are destroying the fabric of the community to restraints on building housing have destroyed the diversity of the community. Again, I would never have predicted that we would have a complete control of the city council by people who in favor of finding ways to build more housing. That essentially the campus area has been completely rebuilt since the observer started and continues to be rebuilt, and the area where it can be rebuilt is growing. Then the things like the projects with the TC 1 zoning down around South State, for example, and also actually up where we are in Maple Miller. There's been a very welcoming legal change, saying, let's go ahead and do this, and now the question is, how will it play out. We know that there's the demand for student housing. I was just recalling to somebody a great line from the late developer Jack Stegeman, Jack built Tower Plaza and the Campus Inn, and he had many other plans for high rises that were all thwarted in later years. Basically a community that was not eager to have redevelopment, especially dramatically, physically different. But his comment was that the central campus is the beating heart of Ann Arbor. We've certainly seen that play out, because where people have been allowed to build high rise housing, in the immediate campus area. People have built and built and built and built. Then the question now is, can that be replicated in places that are farther from campus? Will that happen in TC 1, zones, will it happen on State and Eisenhower? Will it happen on Maple Miller? Will it happen on Plymouth? That's something that's going to be seen and played out, and I'm very interested in that. That's a huge change. Was the attitude toward growth, the acceptance of growth, and then the resulting growth. The university for many years hung at 35,000 students now it's north of 50 and that, of course, as Jack would have predicted, has driven everything else in that neighborhood. Then there's been the huge change in the ethnic makeup of the city. I think probably when we started, I think that probably Ann Arbor's Black population was 14% of the total, something like that. I lived down on North Fourth Avenue. When I moved into my home there in 1980, all of the immediate neighbors were Black, except for one interracial couple across the street. That has shrunk. We've seen that the disappearance, essentially, the forcing out of people who were living in old housing that has been rejuvenated or replaced. the Black community is now based typically farther in the eastern part of the county. Then Frances Kai-Hwa Wang wrote a feature for our City Guide a couple of years back on the amazing growth of the Asian population, which is now proportionately comparable to what the Black population had been 40 years ago. Of course, that also reflects the growth of the professional class here. That's a huge difference. Politically, ethnically, culturally, everybody will tell you that and much more impoverished city, that when Ann Arbor was a cheap place to be and a creative person could just say, I'm going to take over that old factory and put a theater in it and a lot of workspace for creative people.
- [00:49:46] PATRICIA GARCIA: Performance Network.
- [00:49:47] JOHN HILTON: Performance Network. Actually, the building was the network, and Performance Network was the theater. Those people have, in fact, migrated to the Eastern county, too. Those have all been major changes that we've seen, and I'm sure that's barely scratching the surface.
- [00:50:01] PATRICIA GARCIA: Disappointing for us, of course, is the change from locally owned businesses to national franchise businesses that do not support the observer, they don't support the nonprofit organizations. Typically, I don't want to generalize, but for the most part, those franchise and corporate retail businesses do not support the community. That's impacted our advertising sales because we love local business, local ownership. We can go into the business and talk to the owner, talk to the manager, and work with them, which is not possible with franchise companies.
- [00:50:39] JOHN HILTON: Many, not even well beyond retail, the insurance agencies have been scooped up into networks. The car dealerships have been scooped up into networks. There has been a much more economic concentration, which has worked to our detriment because somebody who's buying advertising for a dealership chain based in Ohio is not going to say, I know the Observer, I want to be there.
- [00:51:02] PATRICIA GARCIA: It is a quality of life issue, too, we feel that we've done a lot to with respect to our calendar and our stories to share with readers, to share with new residents who move into the community and find it very helpful, especially the City Guide when they come into town. I remember many years ago when my daughter was still in high school and dancing here in Ann Arbor. She was teaching a dance class downtown, and I was watching the class, a gentleman standing next to me, said, which daughter is yours? I said, the one in the front of the class, teaching all the little kindergarten girls. He said, well, what do you do? I told him I published The Observer. He said, my gosh, you're the reason we moved to Ann Arbor. I received a job offer at the university, a hospital, and they were debating about whether to come. His wife convinced him, well, let's go and take a look after having received a copy of The Observer. She had told him it looks like a really interesting community. Look at this magazine. They came for an interview and decided to move here. That was a nice story to hear that we had influenced someone moving to the community.
- [00:52:16] ELIZABETH SMITH: The publication is very focused on the local community. How do each of you define community? Is it your goal to capture everything, or are you more focused on certain aspects?
- [00:52:27] JOHN HILTON: Well, the one thing I say, I talk about how we don't have an editorial position. We really don't feel like we're smart enough to tell people what they should do and as I said, I marvel at the way the city has changed, and I would never predicted a lot of it. But I do say that we do have one editorial position, which is that we share this space, and we have a common interest in this space, and life going well here. That's our given. We don't shy away from reporting about difficulties because that's part of sharing the space. But we do believe that we have a community in common simply because of our physical proximity, because we share this space and so that's, what we define as a community really is, is just trying to understand one another, trying to understand the town. Actually, the Hunts had a very early slogan. They put it at the back end of those very first issues. I remember it was, "It puts you in touch with the town," and that's what we've tried to do ever since. We haven't again, tried to tell the town what to be, but we tried to understand what it is and share that with the people who live here.
- [00:53:25] PATRICIA GARCIA: Excellent. I couldn't have put it better myself.
- [00:53:29] PATRICIA GARCIA: Mary had a comment about the type of people that we wanted to reach in town. Do you remember?
- [00:53:34] JOHN HILTON: Yes.
- [00:53:34] PATRICIA GARCIA: That list?
- [00:53:35] JOHN HILTON: Yes. I don't remember the whole list. But Mary had been volunteering in the, U. S. Bicentennial and so she'd been meeting some interesting people in town. She had actually been teaching German down in Dundee. But she had a list of ideal readers, the people that she wanted to be able to feel that they understood the observer, and, that they would find things that they cared about there and one was, of course, a professor. One was, of course, a graduate student, pretty much a given. But then there was the lineman for Michigan Bell, as it was at the time, later to become Miratech, later to be absorbed back into the Bell system. Because she'd met him through the union that had a union hall over on Huron Street, and he was volunteering for things. Then the other was a 90-year-old German grandmother on the Old West Side and she didn't want any of those people to feel it wasn't for them. She wanted to speak in a way that could be understood by all of them about things that all of them could care about. I haven't really tried to update that list. We know that we have a lot more technical people. We have a lot more professional people. Their share of the audience is greater.
- [00:54:42] PATRICIA GARCIA: But our goal is to have something in the issue that would appeal to anyone in the community that picks it up.
- [00:54:50] JOHN HILTON: Making sense of the Medical Center, for example. There's a lot of people involved in that, making sense of the schools. There's a lot of people who care about that and always will.
- [00:54:59] KATRINA ANBENDER: What are you each most proud of?
- [00:55:01] JOHN HILTON: I'm proud that we're still here. Really, that was my motive when I talked to Don all those years ago was that I loved what The Observer was. I couldn't see anybody who was not part of it, wanting to continue it as it was because it takes some explaining. I work with people who've written for a lot of places, and it's still like saying, yes, that's a good experience. We're going to be place first, we're going to be people first. We're going to understand things, but we're going to explain them in the human terms of who wants this to happen and so I'm just as I said, I was just I could not have imagined a better life than a chance to learn all of these things and to meet all of these people. But just to keep it going and to provide that connection to people in the community to their community, it's been just a wonderful thing. We're hoping to pass that on.
- [00:55:50] PATRICIA GARCIA: Definitely. We want to leave the Observer in good hands at some point, hopefully, sooner rather than later based on our demographic situation. But it's been a wonderful place to live, to work, to play. I've raised my family here. I have so many wonderful friends, and I'm so proud of our staff. All of the staff members that we've worked with through the years and our current staff. They've all been committed, so dedicated to making sure that the observer meets our deadlines and is distributed to everyone in the community every month.
- [00:56:27] JOHN HILTON: Speaking of that. I'm going to put a shout-out to Jen Taylor, who's our events editor, because that's a huge task. Literally, I tell her how much space she has, and then she makes the best choices she can of what goes in there and so it's wonderful to see that going on. John Hinchey still is involved. He was the longest-serving employee, and you'll have a chance to talk to him and find what an interesting guy he is. But that sense too that you're here to represent what is there. You're not here to pass judgment on it, but you're trying to make clear what it is so that anybody who is interested can say, that's for me. That it's not exactly neutrality because we do care about these. We want to understand them. We want to make them clear to people. But that sense that again, we're not dictating what the community should be interested in. We're trying to make clear and available all the fascinating things that are going on here and that's been a huge part of what The Observer's appeal has been all along. Those people do a wonderful job, and they don't get enough appreciation. Every time somebody says, I love your calendar, I send a little note off to Jim and to Michael and Emilly.
- [00:57:35] PATRICIA GARCIA: Nice to get those little notes from readers for calls occasionally.
- [00:57:48] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL talks to as a production of the An Arbor District Library.
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June 6, 2024
Length: 00:57:56
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
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