{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/4q7qn6115s/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Ms. Clayton Hasser and Joetta Melton"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2006-12-13 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Don Ivey (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["American Academy of Family Physicians","family physician","family medicine"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Ms. Clayton Raker Hasser (personal name)","Joetta Melton (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 4 - Hasser_Clayton_Melton_Joetta_Pt1_06_a.wav"]},"duration":1410.0845,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/281/654/original/Hasser_Clayton_Melton_Joetta_Pt1_06_a.wav?1752082528","type":"Audio","format":"audio/wav","duration":1410.0845,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654/transcript/81608","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Ms. Clayton Hasser and Joetta Melton interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/153025/file/281654/transcript/81608/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"This is Don Ivey, Manager of the Center for the History of Family Medicine and today is Wednesday, December 13, 2006. I am here today speaking with Ms. Clayton Raker Hasser and Joetta Melton of the AAFP. \n\n[Clayton, could you please] give us your title?\n\nHasser: It changed over time. But my title when I left the Academy was Vice President for Publications and Communications. \n\nAnd Joetta, what’s your current title?\n\nMelton: For the next thirty-three days I am Director of the Publications Division for the Academy and Publisher for the Academy’s two journals, American Family Physician and Family Practice Management. And then also Publisher for a third journal that we publish on a contract basis, Annals of Family Medicine.\n\nLet’s start at the beginning with both of you. Clayton, tell us about where you were born, when you were born, a little bit about your parents and your background.\n\nHasser: I was born a long time ago in a small town in Missouri called Holden, Missouri which is fifty miles south of Kansas City. I graduated from Holden High School, class of fifty people. Went to a small women’s college. It was at that time a women’s college; there aren’t many of those anymore - called Christian College in Columbia, Missouri. And then went on to the University of Missouri and graduated. I certainly knew by the time I was in high school that I wanted to be in journalism. My grandmother had a journalism degree and graduated from the J School in 1917 or 1918. Her suite mate was Mary Margaret McBride and she was also a classmate of Hemingway’s first wife. And my great-great-grandmother, according to family legend, after the plantation burned, went to Louisville and worked for the Louisville Courier Journal. Now I have not researched that, but that’s family legend. So there was journalism in my background. And I started the high school newspaper, I was editor of the college newspaper. I worked for the Holden newspaper all the summers of my high school. I worked for Warrensburg [Star-Journal] all the summers of my college. So I was going to be a newspaper reporter; I didn’t report for a newspaper after I graduated, my entire career. I became a medical magazine writer, editor, publisher.\n\nJoetta, give us a little bit of background.\n\n\nMelton: I was born in Charleston, West Virginia. My father was an electrical engineer. My mother went through nurse’s training and worked as a nurse in Labor and Delivery for a couple of years when my brother and I were young. And about the time that I was in second grade, my dad decided that he would pick up the family and move us to Brazil so that he could pursue his dream of working in the field in electrical engineering, literally in the field, and still make the kind of money that he thought he should be deserved – and that was only possible at the time if you went overseas. So we moved to Brazil with the intentions of living there for the rest of our lives. But we only were there about two years and the power company that my dad worked for nationalized, so we had to leave the country rather suddenly. Spent the next five years or so after that in various countries, my dad took various engineering jobs until we came back to the United States for my brother and I to go to high school. I graduated from Jackson, Michigan High School and then went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and got a degree in English with a minor in Latin and a secondary teaching certificate. And unfortunately I absolutely hated teaching. So I had this four-year degree that I considered totally worthless until I got a job as a clerk typist for an orthopedic surgical company in Michigan, the Stryker Corporation, and worked for them in the marketing department. And my undergraduate minor in Latin came in very handy. One of the first things they asked me to do was memorize all the names of the bones of the body. So I worked for them for eight years and while I was working for them, they encouraged me to go on and get my master’s degree in business administration, which I did. Graduated from the University of Michigan-Kalamazoo. Then managed an ad agency in Kalamazoo for five years before I came to the Academy.\n\nHasser: I didn’t realize you started out as a clerk typist, which is kind of similar to how I got into medical journalism. I had no intent of going into medical journalism. I graduated, got married and my husband was stationed in Tacoma. I went looking for a job and was the top graduate out of MU J School and was sure I was going to work for the newspaper. Went to interview at the Tacoma newspaper in 1963 (inaudible comment). So I ended up being a receptionist for two doctors, a neurologist and a neurosurgeon (inaudible).\n\nSo you both had a little bit of exposure to the medical field before you got here?\n\nMelton: Yes.\n\nHasser: I raised a family for ten years and then I went back to work and was first a freelancer and then a writer and then an editor, then an executive editor and chief editor of another journal called Patient Care. Was there for ten years.\n\nSo actually you all had quite a bit of experience in medical ---- and journals before you got here. Let’s talk a little bit about how you came to be hired at the Academy. Can you tell us a little bit about that Clayton?\n\nHasser: I was in a situation in Darien where the journal had been acquired by Medical Economics and the department was going to be moved from Darien, Connecticut over to New Jersey, so on a good day it was an hour commute on I-95. So I decided I might look for a job. And I’d been chief editor for about five years, so I thought about being a publisher. And after having some interviews, there really wasn’t very much available. And I knew also it would be very difficult to become a publisher. So a friend of mine, Roger Sherwood, you might have met at many STFM meetings, through my job as editor of Patient Care suggested I interview here because he said the magazine publisher position was open. So I interviewed with Bob Graham (inaudible) for five months. I met him for the first time at an Assembly, so that would have been September of ’86 and then we met several times whenever he was having a meeting. I flew to Palm Springs and had a meeting by the swimming pool at the Palm Springs Hotel. And finally got to the point where my boss at Patient Care who ended up being a good friend of mine needed an answer about whether or not I was going to ---- (inaudible). And it was a great career move for me both professionally and financially.\n\nMelton: My job up in Michigan, I was general manager for an ad agency who specialized in health care accounts. And I had some very, very close friends here in Kansas City and had just mentioned in passing to them, somebody I might like to move to Kansas City to be closer with them. So they started sending the Sunday paper, the want ads to me. I had no idea that the Academy was even in Kansas City. I’d never even heard of the Academy because all of my background was in orthopedics. So in one of the want ad sections there was an ad for a clerk typist for the Academy, but I clearly did not want to apply for that position. But I sent my resume in to the HR Director at the time and the HR Director called me after about a week and said we don’t have any openings that would be of interest to you at this time but I’ll keep your resume on file. And I thought yeah, sure. That was in January of ’86. And lo and behold, it wasn’t but a couple of weeks later she called me in and said that the person who was the marketing manager for the journal, at that time there was just the one journal, American Family Physician. She said the marketing manager for American Family Physician had just died and would I be interested in applying for that position – and I said yes, of course. So that started the process. And again, it took a long, long time. This was before Clayton was hired also. Bob Graham was at the time…did he have the Publisher title? \n\nHasser: When Walt died, he took the Publisher title because he wanted to take his time.\n\nMelton: So Bob was the Publisher and he was doing the interviewing. But they opened the position for consideration in late January. I did actually not get an interview until September. It took them that long to get through the paperwork and figure out who else they wanted to interview, etc. I got an interview in September and then Bob Graham called me a week later or so and offered me the position and then I started in November.\n\nHasser: So you had been here weeks or months by the time I interviewed here. Joetta was one of the interviewers. When I got beyond interviewing with Bob Graham two or three or four times, or however many it was, I remember interviewing with Joetta (inaudible).\n\nMelton: It was early in the year when we met you. Then you started in April [1987]. \n\nHasser: And I always knew that if I ever moved back to Kansas City, that I would want to work for the Academy. I knew the Academy was headquartered here. And also the AFP, American Family Physician, was the only journal (maybe there might have been one other journal I would have been glad to work for). (inaudible)\n\nWhen you interviewed Clayton, what was your first impression of her?\n\nMelton: We were in kind of a limbo situation because Bob Graham was the Publisher. And although he was very interested in the publishing operation, we really felt somewhat like we didn’t have a leader, almost rudderless, because he was so busy with so many other things. He was also, of course, EVP of the Academy at the time. So publishing was not his only concern obviously. So we wanted somebody in that position. And then to get the opportunity to interview with Clayton and realize what her background was and what a strong editorial background and good business sense she was going to bring to the position was a real plus.\n\nHasser?: He was quite clear that he wanted to hire somebody to the Editorial side. And traditionally when you are hiring a Publisher, you hire somebody from the Sales side. And he did not want to do that. He had interviewed some salespeople who came out of New York that our Sales staff referred to him and he felt that they were just sort of good old boys. And he wanted somebody who would really take a look at the journals and decide (inaudible).\n\nTell us a little bit, when you both first came to the Academy what was the culture and the environment like? And how did it change over the years?\n\nHasser?: Quite a bit. When I first came, I think there were maybe 150 employees, something in that range. This is when we were still at the 1740 building, 1740 W. 92nd, whatever it was. (a very odd building) Publications was a little bit different as a division of the Academy. It always has been, and is to this day, relatively isolated from the other divisions. Although at the time there was still a Publications Committee providing member oversight to the publications operation. That is no longer the case. So that now is a very clear difference between the Publications Division and the other divisions here at the Academy that have member oversight.    \n\nMelton?: I think we also didn’t have as much respect because since we worked ----, really didn’t even know what we did. I think they thought everybody just sat over here and (inaudible). And I don’t think there was any recognition of…there might have been knowledge of at a certain level, but any recognition of the contributions Publications gave to the bottom line of the Academy (inaudible). \n\nTell us a little bit about the growth and the changes you both saw in the years ...\n\nHasser: I would like to go back to the culture.\n\nSure.\n\nHasser: There was a very, very big difference in the role of the female back when we came (inaudible). There also I think was much more of an atmosphere of this is an association and it’s a pretty non-competitive association. At the very, very top, the first glimmerings of the Academy as a non-profit association might be to start thinking in a bigger scope in order to be competitive. That has changed dramatically over the years. I’m not sure that it has changed as much as it needs to (inaudible)…but I think that we experienced those two things together. And for me that was both the joy and the stress of our jobs because (inaudible). We loved putting out a good journal but we expected to be compensated. And money was a bad word around here. Making money was a bad word because everybody else was ---- at the time. But we were a little bit outsiders simply because of that. And both Joetta and I are very competitive, and that’s one of the qualities we brought with us. (inaudible)\n\nMelton: You mentioned the female executives. There were very few women in upper management at the Academy at the time.\n\nHasser: No VPs and a handful of women to what was called the division director level. I can think of two, maybe three, besides myself.\n\nMelton: More as time went on. But definitely not at the beginning. Culture-wise, let me just give you an example: I was hired in as the Marketing Manager for the journals. And I had been accustomed both at Stryker and at the advertising agency that I managed, I had a personal computer. Now, of course, back then it was a little Apple 3E doo-dah that was probably little more than an Etch-A-Sketch compared to what we have today. But at the time, the personal computer business was just getting started and the Academy invested a lot of money. They bought probably give personal computers, five monitors to hook to a mainframe or whatever. I remember one of them was sitting on my administrative assistant’s desk. I did not have one on my desk. (Because you had to justify it.) Yes, so she had one on her desk. And I would wait until 5:00 in the evening when she went home and then I’d go sit at her desk and do my computer work – my database work, my spreadsheet work, etc. on the computer. And I can remember sitting there one evening and Bob Graham walked by and he said Joetta, I would be very careful doing what you’re doing because people will get the wrong idea about your position if they see you in front of a computer. And I said oh, really? That had to be maybe before you [Clayton] even started. So it was in early ’87, I’d say, when only…and back then they were called secretaries. Only selected secretaries had computers back then.\n\nHasser: He made it quite clear to me that the female/male ratio was going to change. And you have to understand, he had a very successful, very strong leadership at the FPA [?] and is now head ----. I may have been his first division director hired. And he was quite pleased with the fact that it was a woman. And again, Bob Graham was very ---- about that. The relationship between staff and the members I think has changed dramatically. When I came, I was told by my first supervisor…Bob Graham was my first and then I switched over and was supervised for awhile by Dan Ostergaard, then I switched back to Bob Graham. But very early on when I was here, Dan Ostergaard suggested to me that I should call the members “Dr.” instead of by their first name. Now keep in mind, I had had a ten-year career already as editor of a very, very well-known and successful magazine and had recruited physicians to our board of editors and so on and so forth. I was quite used to working with doctors on a peer level and I wasn’t about to call them Dr. And I felt very strongly, including the time when I started to sit with the Board as a Vice President, that they needed to respect the professionalism of the staff. And I don’t think the members did at that time very much. I think that they certainly respected the male members more than the female. They weren’t used to working with female executives. But still, they were doctors. And as we all know, doctors are just a tad lower than God and they’re very secure and confident people, as they need to be to do their profession. And I think over time, part of it because of the lead that Bob Graham took with the way he respected his staff, over time that has changed. Certainly when I was here anyway. And I don’t know what it’s been like for the past five years. And I think some of us had to struggle with that and stand up for what we thought and what we believed on a professional basis. And I remember it just became a mantra for me to say well, my professional opinion is--. And they caught on. I think it’s to their credit that they came around as quickly as they did. Because before staff was just here to fetch and carry ----.\n\nWe were talking a little bit earlier about computers in the early days. Tell us a little bit about the changes you’ve seen over time in technology that applied to the publishing field and the journals.\n\nMelton: It’s amazing. One of the most telling things, and it was a long time before I picked up on this little tidbit…when I started in ’86, AFP, American Family Physician, was published twelves times a year. And we can come back to this in later discussion, but through conscious decisions and very deliberate processes, we moved AFP from twelve times a year to sixteen times a year in the early 90s. And then there was one year when we had seventeen issues. And then the following year it was twenty issues and then about a year later or so we moved to twenty-four issues a year, where we are now. So that’s a huge, huge increase in output of the Publications Division. And at the same time, we launched Family Practice Management in 1993. The same year that we went from twelve issues a year in AFP to sixteen we launched FPM in October of that year. FPM is ten times a year. So again, another huge drain on the staff in the Publications Division. However, because of technology changes, in ’93 we introduced and literally began editing on computer. Before that we would send everything out to be typeset to a typesetting company. But we started editing and doing layouts on the computer in 1993. It’s interesting that since 1993 we’ve doubled the number of issues of AFP, added ten issues of FPM, added three issues of Annals and we’re doing that with only one more person in the Production Department. Because over the years as we have added work, we have gained efficiencies through technology that our Production Department is…even though we’ve got deadlines in the Production Department, every single week there is some journal that is closing out and going to the printer. We’re still able to do that with not many more of a head cout.\n\nHasser: Which was a huge thing for staff because it’s interesting that we computerized and started editing the same year we started to do page layouts. The journal I came from, Patient Care, we had already been editing and were networked with each. Well, maybe we weren’t networked but we were edited anyway. And when I came here, I thought ah –ha, they don’t have computers, we’re going to have to get computers in the Editorial Production Department. Oh no, it took six years. We were probably the last journal in the country to computerize from the editor’s desk but among the first to do it from a production basis because we were working hand-in-hand with a very good printing company who provided us with all kinds of feedback. But that was just mind boggling.\n\nMelton: Yes, they were interesting times, very. People had to be taught how to use a mouse even.   \n\nTell us a little bit about each of the journals that you were involved with and what are each of you proudest of in your contributions to each of those?\n\nHasser: Well, my first is to say that the highlight of my entire career was the first issue of FPM because it’s rare for a publisher to have, particularly in the field of smaller medical publishing, to have the honor and the privilege and the excitement of being able to start a journal. But on my way over here, I was thinking about going from twelve to twenty to twenty-four issues. And that was just ---- and happened over a longer period of time. And I think we have to go back to the competitiveness and what happened to AFP, the competitiveness that Joetta and I felt in what happened to AFP. The staff was in a certain mode. I think we held expectations up that the Sales staff would sell as many pages as possible. And that became a joke around the office – well, how many pages do you want us to get? Well, what do you want us to do Clayton? Do you want us to get all the pages? Well, yes. And we were really very stuck. And we were a second-tier journal. We had in front of us Patient Care, Postgraduate Medicine, sometimes Hospital Practice, certainly JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine. And we were competitive enough, we said no, we want to be on the top. And I think the staff was a little skeptical of that. But anyway we did start to get more pages because we really analyzed and really worked towards that. Then we got to a point where AFP was so thick and everybody was saying make it smaller. Well, the doctors will never stand for it. Then we sat down in an editorial meeting and one of the doctors said “I don’t think the doctors would know the difference of how many issues they’re getting; they’ll just notice that they’re smaller.” And that’s what they wanted. They were sick and tired of those ---- issues. So Joetta and I did an analysis and Joetta did her numbers crunching and basically felt that we could take a calculated risk and go to more issues. And it was hugely successful. We were able to bring in that many more pages because the advertisers were excited because the journals were smaller, so we were able to pick up some more of those. So then we went to twenty pages, twenty issues a year. Everybody was excited about that. And we kept getting more pages. And in the meantime, the staff was doing training to analyze and go out and sell and get pages from as many people as possible, obviously. And we just had Hospital Practice, had Patient Care and finally Postgraduate Medicine. And we were on the top of that tier. And I remember the sales meeting, I can’t tell you want year it was, but we said okay, here we are – I guess we might as well go after JAMA and New England now. And we did. And now in the primary care section, you’re surpassing…I think right before I left, we surpassed JAMA. And now you’re surpassing both JAMA and New England, right?\n\nMelton: No, New England is still higher. But it’s just amazing to think about going…this was a huge decision not just from the potential that oh my gosh, what are the doctors going to think if they get four more issues a year, going from twelve to sixteen. And as Clayton mentioned, we of course did our number crunching and figured out did a little cost/benefit analysis. And we realized to add four more issues a year was literally going to cost us half a million dollars. We plugged it somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000. Closer to $500,000. It could have been just a huge, horrible mistake. But we really did a good job, I think, of determining what the risk, the downside, that the doctors would get fed up and would stop reading if we continued the way we were doing it. The issues were so thick and they felt so compelled to read every single issue that frankly we were putting pressure on them by having big issues. And they resented that; they were ready to rebel. We got letters from members – and it was very rare that you get a letter from a member complaining about the journals.\n\nHasser: We of those issues, we had a couple of issues (inaudible). They were complaining about the amount of trees we were killing. This showed you how loyal the readers were to AFP because they felt their self-esteem was hooked into whether they got their AFP read, their association to journal read. They felt they were staying up-to-date if they got it read. And if we gave them too many pages and they couldn’t read it, they were so angry. But I think, didn’t we sit down with the Sales staff to sort of analyze okay, if we do this how many more pages do you think we’ll be able to bring in? And it worked.   \n\nMelton: Yes, it did. And after we made the move from twelve to sixteen, the move from sixteen to twenty was much easier to time in terms of really knowing yes, this will be successful. And then the twenty to twenty-four was a no-brainer.   \n\nHasser: But the Production in particular and some of the other people used to dread it. And Joetta and I called a meeting of the division because we were afraid that they were going to get an announcement that we were starting a new journal, but we were increasing the number of times a year that AFP was going to publish. But at the same time too, as AFP was moving up because of the number of ad pages they could take because we were increasing the number of issues, it was also moving up because of the recognition it was getting or the visibility that we were providing in New York City because of being involved in the trade associations. The Association of Medical Publishers, the Healthcare Marketing Communications Council, Society of Newspaper…   \n\nMelton: The Society of National Association Publications.\n\nHasser: We divided the associations’ events, Joetta. And there are the for-profit magazines and then there are association magazine. The association magazines are like New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and AFP. Well, the for-profits used to ignore the associations because they thought they had an edge on. And then as business turned a certain way, they thought they would bring them in. So we sort of started to be part of the pack and that was good. And then we started to participate in industry kinds of functions and policy-making decisions and guidelines and this, that and the other. And I think that helped overall too as far as our visibility.\n\nMelton: The other thing that really helped in terms of ad sales was when we started and we first talked to our ad sales people…we inherited ad sales people, keep in mind. And we asked them what they thought their role was and they thought their role at that time was to be ambassadors for the journal as salespeople, not ad salespeople – they were ambassadors. And over a period of time, through Clayton’s leadership and after I became Publisher, through mine as well, they really came to understand you need to be out there selling. You can’t just be out there making nice all the time. You have to understand your customers, you have to meet their needs and deliver the goods to get out those pages because that is important for the ongoing financial success of the association.\n\nHasser: And that was difficult because as far as they were concerned, I had never been a salesperson so I didn’t understand their business at all. So why was I telling them to go out and sell pages? And even worse, why was I telling them how to sell pages? Hence the comment, what do you want us to do – get all the pages? Yes…\n\nThat leads to another question. I’d like each of you to tell us a little bit about your style of leadership, your kind of philosophy of management and how did you come to develop that over the years.\n\nLet’s start with you, Clayton.\n\nHasser: Well, I probably am still uninformed. I came from a camp command and control environment. My yeas with Patient Care, I was a woman under men. I’d always been a woman under men and I was used to command control. It was the only thing I knew. Certainly my family life was command and control. So this sharing business and this teamwork was just totally foreign to me. I think to the degree I was able, I think I tried to adopt Bob Graham’s management style. And he was certainly a person under whom someone could blossom. I think it was one of the greatest gifts I ever had, to work for him, because I think professionally I blossomed because I was able to work in the environment he established. He would truly see these goals and let you go. Joetta came to him with some really big ideas and he would sit there and was a very linear thinking and he trusted us enough and had so little ego himself that he would give you the rope to sink or swim. So my style became more of a team thing except it still was much easier for me to command and control. And I think one of the things as far as style is concerned that Joetta and I were in on early on was the time to develop the staff. So the staff started taking responsibility for their own decisions instead of just coming to a manager and asking a manager to solve the problem. And that was right at the beginning of the staff development years. And that was really exciting because both of us really enjoyed that and really grasped onto that and really wanted to pass it on to the others. And I think that we were leaders in the Academy (inaudible). We were doing things that other divisions weren’t doing at all.\n\nMelton: Oh, absolutely. I would agree with Clayton’s assessment of that. I was looking back at, it was 1994 and ’95. Actually it was early ’95 when we finalized the vision for our intrapersonal environment within the Publications Division. And there were ten points on that vision statement and they probably would sound familiar to you, Don, because they’re things like we treat each other with courtesy and respect, we have fun, we don’t talk about each other; we talk to each other. If you have a concern, you own it and you go directly to the person that you have the concern with. After consideration of concerns, if things don’t go the way you had hoped they would, you have the opportunity to raise the issue one more time. But after that, you’re going to need to let it go and you can’t keep harping on it. All those things that within the last eighteen months have been adopted by the Academy was their culture document, we literally wrote in the Publications Division the foundation document for that in 1994 and were living it for ten years before the Academy as a whole ever thought about the term “culture club” or “culture document.” We had that and that was our model. And the interesting thing was that we held that document, held everybody to that standard. I know Clayton had instances as did I where somebody would come to us and say you know, Susie’s over there and she’s doing thus and so and I don’t like that. And before they could even finish the sentence, we would say well, have you talked to Susie about that? If not, don’t come to me until you have talked to Susie. So it was those kinds of things where by putting, as Clayton says, the emphasis on taking personal responsibility for your own behaviors, your own happiness, your own job satisfaction, it really brings the level of professionalism and changes the tone and the tenure and the culture of the division, even though the rest of the Academy did not necessarily follow the same rules at the same time we were – we really were an island unto ourselves in that.\n\nHasser?: And it became a work performance thing. And we even did a 360 Degree Group and were becoming quite comfortable with it. And then for legal reasons we decided we should stop. And I don’t think they’ve ever picked it up again, although other corporations (inaudible).\n\nTalk a little bit about that. What is a 360 Degree Group?\n\nHasser: 360 is when your staff gives you a work performance evaluation. And then you see what they have said and you pick out several elements that you would like to have more information on. Because often people comment on things that come as a pleasant surprise to you because we all have our blind spots. So then you sit down with the staff and ask them to explain to you and give you examples of this kind of behavior. And you have to learn how to be able to sit and absorb that kind of criticism and you have to be able to decide how you’re going to handle it and what you’re going to do about it. And it makes a manager mature real quick because you have to have some skills to be able to handle that kind of thing. \n\nMelton: One of the important things about the 360 feedback and the modeling of behavior, Clayton really helped all of us unify modeling of behavior. We embarked upon the 360 degree feedback. She was the first one where she got feedback from all of the department heads. We filled out the survey and gave our surveys to her to look over. And then we actually went to my townhouse and we had a breakfast at my townhouse one morning and we all sat around my large dining room table. It was an informal setting because we were off campus. But Clayton really opened the dialogue by asking for more clarification, what did you mean when you said X? Help me understand, things like that. It’s never easy to do that, but made it easier for the department heads who reported to Clayton at the time to provide her with direct feedback to help her grow as a manager. And the other thing, we used to have these, when we launched the interpersonal work environment vision we would have what we called “vision sessions.” They were maybe once a month.\n\nHasser?: This is teamwork gone awry. \n\nMelton: Yeah, but they actually served a purpose because right now the Academy is having trouble implementing their culture document because there haven’t been any real training sessions about what does it mean to treat each other with courtesy.  \n\nHasser: We actually had coaching sessions. Because if you said to somebody this is professional behavior, they had no idea what you were talking about. Because most of these women had been housewives (we had a couple of men) and they had not been in a “normal” work environment and didn’t know what professional behavior was. \n\nMelton: There was one time when Clayton and I had a disagreement and we used the interpersonal, the vision ourselves to work through this disagreement. I don’t even remember what it was. And we did that in front of everybody, the entire division as I recall, so that they could see two people in real time working through a disagreement. \n\nHasser: And they were shocked.\n\nMelton: All I can remember is both you and I have had visceral reactions to a situation and how we worked through those gut-wrenching experiences in front of the entire division as a way to model that it is possible to have a disagreement, to work through it in a professional way, remain calm and come through it on the other side having grown through the experience.   \n\nHasser: One reason our division was very good to work with on that is because the division is very, I think editors and writers tend to be indirect people by and large. So we had a division with a lot of indirect ----. So people were having difficulty working (inaudible).\n\nI want to expand on that a little bit. You talked some about the big dreams, but let’s talk a little bit about some of the disappointments. What do you see as your greatest disappointments?\n\nMelton: I think it was really a disappointment the way we approached the internet initially.  \n\nHasser: That would be my disappointment. And we were finally successful with it, but professionally it caused a great deal of turmoil. When we started to do the internet as the Academy, it was part of the RIS. And Joetta and I thought as a publishing function and argued that many times. I argued with Bob Graham about it. It was amazingly difficult for people to understand why it was a publishing function. That it was the planning, the gathering, the packaging and the presenting of information. That it was just like AFP except it was ----. They saw it totally as a technical ----.\n\nSo you saw the Academy’s production of their website essentially as an extension of the... \n\nHasser: Yes. And so I guess that went on for five years. And finally it was through my relationship with Rosie [Sweeney], after many, many discussions, that the clouds finally parted and she understood and she took it to Bob. I respect her for doing this, she was willing to let it go because she did believe it was a publishing function. And I must say, we had gotten over a lot of technical humps in the meantime. So she was ready to turn that over and Bob finally agreed. And that was right before he left and right before I retired also. So then Publications grew by having another division. So that was very difficult because one of the hardest things I think we had is that people didn’t really understand our profession. And I think from your background I would expect that you can understand that people see writers and editors, they think you just sit down and start writing something and really don’t understand the craft that is involved with it. And it also is not scientific, it’s soft, so people think oh, I can do that. I know how to deliver a message. That’s not difficult. So that becomes very hard. And when the entire organization didn’t understand what we did and didn’t respect, or it appears and I don’t want to over-dramatize this, didn’t understand (I think understand is a better word), still it doesn’t do your job satisfaction much good. And I think that was a very, very difficult thing to do.\n\nMelton: I guess I’m a bit of a Pollyanna or maybe I’m suffering from select memory. We not only experienced our own angst, if that’s the word you want to us, as we were one of the first women to rise through the ranks, not only in the Academy but also in our industry, but we became role models for the women who were on our staff. And that was very important and probably one of the greatest pleasures of my career. We had an entry-level position in the Editorial division. And there are some stellar women who now hold very responsible management jobs here or even on the outside who started out as an editorial assistant. And I think one of the greatest joys I’ve ever had is mentoring those young women. We just had a slough who were really, really talented. Leigh McKinney is one of those, Suzanna Guzman is another one, Sarah West. Even on the AFP staff now, almost all of the manuscript editors and senior editors started as editorial assistants and worked through the progression of editorial assistant to manuscript editor then senior manuscript editor and then senior editor. And the same thing with FPM. Leigh Ann Backer who is managing editor of FPM started as an editorial assistant on FPM. So it’s a great joy indeed to watch those strong people progress through.\n\nHasser: Because we had no role models. I mean we were role models. I was the first female editor of a primary care magazine and the second or third female publisher. And on all the boards of ---- professions we were second or third skirt. But they had role models and we were their first role models. And I’ll never forget one time, just to show you an example of this, there was a very difficult situation and I virtually had to fire the person and the staff was very, very concerned about her mental health. And I remember having to announce it and it was the most difficult staff member who had to leave. And people were very concerned that this had happened to her because they were afraid of what she would do. And I remember afterwards, Sarah West came to my office and she said I really want to compliment you. We didn’t know a woman could make that kind of hard decision. So that’s a pretty powerful decision to be made.\n\nJoetta, tell us what’s the toughest decision you ever had to make?\n\nMelton: I know I’m probably not alone in this, but as you go further up the ladder, the hierarchical structure, you get further and further away from the content area that you first started in. In my case, I first started on the marketing side. And the research and the numbers crunching and all that kind of stuff has always been my first love. And as you go higher up in the hierarchy, the problems that are presented to you are less related to your original love and maybe your education and experience that way and they become more staff issues, more personnel issues. And those are always the hardest. Promoting somebody or giving somebody a bonus, that’s fun. And interpersonal issues become more complex especially in this division where interpersonal issues, we really put the lid on it and say don’t bring an interpersonal issue to me unless you have attempted to resolve it yourself first. So by the time it gets to a manager, they have tried and maybe it’s not been successful or for whatever reason they need to kick it up to a higher level. So it’s a more complex situation when it gets to the manager. So those issues have always been the hardest and the ones that I agonize. If it’s something like spending an extra $10,000 on an issue to add four more pages for some special article or something, I can make that decision quickly. So the personnel issues are really the hardest ones. And there have been some very, very tough situations that we’ve had to do over the years. Whether it was budget reduction, letting people go because of that, or performance issues, it’s always difficult. It never seems easy.\n\nIf you could start all over and do things differently, what would you change? Would you do anything differently? That’s a tough one but I have to ask it.\n\nMelton: I really feel very good leaving in thirty-some days. I feel like the journals are in good shape, the staff is in good shape. I’ve got great people. I don’t think my leaving should cause a ripple because the people that we have in place now can go forward without skipping a beat. I have that much confidence. Not through anything that I’ve done, but just because they themselves are very, very confident and strong managers and passionate about what they do is actually a good way to say that.\n\nWhat about you? Would you have done anything differently? Go back and change anything?\n\nHasser: When you asked that question, I thought if anything it would probably be to manage a little less. But if you were to give me a different situation, I probably would do the same thing all over again. And that’s certainly something I would give consideration to. And I can’t think of anything I would do much differently. The major thought I had after you asked that question is how lucky I was to have a job in which I could grow and I could live up to my fullest potential. I think I was just so lucky to put myself in a position to come here. So when we sit here and talk about it, because I’ve forgotten about a lot of this stuff that we did that was just wonderful. I think we really lived out our ideals and what we wanted to do. And I think I had my fair share of conflicts and I think I stood up when I wanted to stand up and sat down sometimes.\n\nMelton: I like that word lucky. I consider myself very lucky too having had Clayton as my boss for fifteen years almost (fourteen) and then now Michael for the last five and a half. I think I’ve had an excellent position in terms of autonomy and independence. Neither Clayton nor Michael micromanaged me in the least. I get challenges and the interesting thing is in my case both Clayton and Michael as my supervisors, each of them has what I think is probably a sixth sense. I think they know me better than I know myself because each of them came to me with new challenges just at a time before I really had said to myself you know, I’m getting bored. So I think over the twenty years, the level of challenges has been the right level. Not overly stressful but at the right level to maintain my engagement.\n\nHasser: I don’t know Michael well, but I think the similarity there is that neither one of us likes to take the lead (inaudible). Some of my philosophies, and I think Joetta’s also, is that we looked around and most of our peers in the industry worked at for-profit organizations that had multi-pronged publishing ventures. And we frankly wanted the Publications Division of the Academy to be as big and as successful as any of those for-profit ventures. So if they were doing videotapes, we wanted to do videotapes. If they were doing monographs, we wanted to do monographs. If they were putting out patient education pamphlets, we wanted to put out patient education pamphlets because we felt that we had an edge competitively with anybody because of the association with the Academy (inaudible). But I want to say too the lucky part here, and I really appreciate Joetta asking me to include this…I’ve always wanted to say this that this works because Joetta and I are really a good team. She has skills that I couldn’t come close to touching and I have a couple that might be somewhat different from hers. So we were kind of like a good marriage, we really complemented each other. And I think it was just serendipitous that we came to the Academy when frankly, and I hope this is not ego, it just worked for everybody. It worked for the Academy, it worked for us.\n\nMelton: Definitely, I agree. The great communication between us and everything really did help. \n\nLet’s talk a little bit about some of the people who touched your lives in the many years you’ve been here. Do any individuals come to mind?\n\nMelton: Certainly Bob Graham because he hired each of us. \n\nHasser: I’d have to mention Bob Edsall because I brought him here. Bob worked with me at Patient Care and then when we started FPM we asked him to come here and start FPM as the Editor. So that’s just a longstanding professional relationship for me. So I’m so glad he did that because I don’t know anybody who could have stepped in as successfully as Bob.\n\nMelton: I agree definitely. Sarah Thomas, Director of the Communications Division – who you hired and was one of the best decisions you made.   \n\nHasser: Yes. She has been a terrific colleague and peer for me as a fellow division director. A great resource to me in terms of crafting messages to a superb ---- and thinking through what are the key points? Whether it’s a communication to an external organization or group or whether it’s a communication inside the division. For example, perhaps a touchy communication ----.\n\nMelton: We’re talking a lot about Publications but I also (inaudible). The Academy has had some successes, but Sarah came in with a fresh new look at everything and really brought the communications effort of this organization up to a new level, just to the absolute top. And I think she and Clayton have just done unbelievable things as far as the recognition that the Academy has on the outside as the public views it. One of the perpetual criticisms was that the Academy was not mentioned very much, at least when I was ----. What they’re doing now just blows my mind, a superb job.\n\nMelton: One of the ways that we’ve been able to collaborate between Publishing and Communications is when we launched Annals of Family Medicine in 2003 and also [Annals of] Family Medicine is published six times a year. And the Academy doesn’t actually own it. It’s owned by a consortium of six organizations, the six major family medicine organizations: the Academy, the American Board of Family Medicine, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, the Association of Departments of Family Medicine, the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors. And those six organizations each owns a piece, if you will, of a corporation that itself owns and publishes Annals of Family Medicine. That corporation contracts with the Academy’s Publishing Division to act as a publishing arm. So we perform the editing functions, etc. We have Kurt Stange from Case Western is our Editor-in-Chief or medical editor for Annals of Family Medicine and he has a group of associate editors. But we perform the staff editing functions, the production functions, circulation functions, etc. That journal launching in ’03 since then has provided a huge hook for Communications to tag their messages about the discipline of family medicine to articles that have appeared in Annals of Family Medicine. And newsworthy articles much the way JAMA and New England have the huge PR arms to work with the health writers around the country announcing articles that are coming up in many cases. There may be an article coming up in JAMA about some liver enzyme study that was conducted. But the articles that appear in Annals of Family Medicine are research articles, original research. They’re not about some liver enzyme; they’re about whole people, real people. It is much easier for the health writers to grab a hook and grab it to a story and turn that into something that is of interest to the lay consumer, the lay reader of The New York Times or the Kansas City Star or the Wall Street Journal, etc.\n\nHasser: I can think of two people: Mike Miller who was just an incredible light around this place. The reason I really liked Mike is talk about having disagreements with people – he was delightful to have a disagreement with. He had that wonderful lawyer mind. Very, very strict. But he was passionate about his work and he had the highest standards when it came to professional ethics and he did more good for this Academy. And Mike loved accolades and he deserved every single one of them. So I had to mention him. And the other one is Jay Siwek. I just really enjoyed working with Jay. And you know he was the first family physician medical editor of AFP. And that was an extraordinary step. When I came in and when Joetta first came, Dr. John Rose, who was on the Georgetown medical faculty in, if I remember, endocrinology. He was a subspecialist and that was back in the days when family medicine was really a stepchild. And AFP published as if family medicine were a stepchild and he was the chief Editor as a subspecialist. And all the associate editors were subspecialists too except for ----. And Jay Siwek really put his imprint of family medicine on AFP and has kept in touch with the times as far as adding more research and evidence-based medicine in the “Family Journal” and so forth and has just been a joy to work with. And you know that can be a very difficult relationship between Publisher and Editor. And both Joetta and I very, very strongly felt that was absolutely had to stay out of Jay’s business. And it’s difficult to do sometimes in that we always went up to the brink and said you know, I’ve been thinking. But do that very often – never, ever told him what to do because he absolutely has to have editorial independence. And that was one of our jobs too, to stand between Jay and the Board or the ---- Commission that wanted AFP to publish something as the medical editor. We couldn’t from a business standpoint and from an ethical standpoint become an out-organ for the Academy. It had to be an independent journal. And that worked and luckily it worked because Jay has been at it for ----. It’s really easy to let go.\n\nMelton: Yes. When you have confidence in the Editor’s judgement and the Editor stays in touch with really what the reader needs. And ultimately I still believe if it’s good for the reader, it’s good for the publication, for the advertiser, for the association. Do you want to talk a little bit about launching Family Practice Management? \n\nHasser: Sure. I said that was a high point. The idea for Family Practice Management was mentioned to me by a former colleague. And so I brought the idea back and Joetta and I talked about it. Basically went to Bob Graham and got the okay to go ahead and look into it and we did, hired a consultant, did mockups, we made a presentation to the Board. I’ve never been more nervous in my entire life. And ---- was one of the ones at the Board meeting. I can remember the Board, I can remember where we were, I can remember where I was standing but I can’t remember what I wore. Anyway, ---- was over here and Dan Ostergaard was at the other end of the table. I don’t think we had any idea going in whether that was going to be successful or not. We knew it was probably going to be successful. We thought it was going to be making money (inaudible). But that’s okay because one of the things we probably couldn’t have conveyed to other people but tried was how much this was going to be a window for family practice out to the rest of the world or for the rest of the world to look into and say this is family practice. Because this became a symbol for them of what their specialty was all about. It certainly gave the reader information they could not find anywhere else. There was Medical Economics but it didn’t really publish that many practical articles and they weren’t tailored to family physicians – and family physicians, as they are, that they’re different. It’s been a huge not only service to the reader but a great PR vehicle I think for the specialty. Not only for the organization to its own members but the organization to the outside world. And as many other people would say, it’s like giving birth. I’ll never forget when we opened up that box, were we at a convention in San Francisco?\n\nMelton: ’93. I think it was on the West Coast.\n\nHasser: Maybe it was L.A. or San Francisco; I can’t remember which. And we opened up the box in the staff room and I carried those magazines up to the front to the dais where the officers were sitting. And I had never before and have never experienced it since, but that absolutely floating on air. My feet were not touching the floor.\n\nMelton: The first issue of FPM was timed to arrive in the boxes, the advance copies to arrive during the Congress of Delegates. And what we did during one of the breaks, when Congress was on break, we put an issue at everybody’s seat.\n\nHasser: But I took those issues up to the dais before the break. They were still talking. \n\nMelton: I remember being close to tears and being so excited to see this thing because first we got permission from the Board to spend $75,000 on the feasibility study and we did a very compressed feasibility study. It was very thorough with the help of the consultant. But we got that permission at the summer Board meeting. And between the summer Board meeting and the first weekend in December, we did this huge feasibility study and ended up with each report about an inch and a half thick.\n\nHasser: That’s an amazing amount of time.\n\nMelton: It was very compressed. And we studied advertisers. We asked advertisers what they were thinking, readers what they would think. We developed some mock editorial content to use in the mockup.\n\nHasser: That should be in the Archives.\n\nMelton: It might be; I don’t know. And then we presented it to the Board. And when we presented it to the Board, when we got done and they voted, it was unanimous approval to give us…we were asking for $1.5 million over a three-year period. \n\nHasser: Nobody ever asked for that much money.   \n\nMelton: That was the largest fiscal note that anybody had ever asked for up until that point. We asked for $1.5 million over three years. And they approved it unanimously and then they stood up and applauded. And we were just ecstatic. The consultant was with us, Clayton ---- and the consultant was Debbie Stratton. And we went back to Clayton’s office afterwards and we just looked at each other and went “oh darn, now we have to do it!” (laughter) But we did it. \n\nHasser: And nine months later…\n\nMelton: We gave birth.\n\nHasser: That’s right.\n\nMelton: But that was very exciting. As Clayton said, most publishers do not get the opportunity to launch a new publication. I’ve done two. Family physicians today probably get about seventy publications a month of various sizes and shapes and colors. And the vast majority of them end up in the trash can. I feel fairly certain. There are several that they have a very close tie to and feel very strongly that they must keep, must read. AFP is certainly one of them. FPM is becoming one of them. FPM is now thirteen years old and has had steady increases in their readership. And that’s what we thought: It was just going to take time. And the whole publishing industry changed about the year FPM came out. It was nothing we could have predicted as far as the availability of money and things such as that. And thank God the Academy stuck with it because there were a number of years where it lost money and now it’s breaking even. And it’s such a service to the membership (inaudible). \n\nHasser: We launched in the fall of ’93 right in the middle of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hearings about health reform. And that was arguably the worst time from an advertising perspective to launch a publication. However, it was the best time to provide the kind of information that FPM has in its pages to our members because they were really feeling the crunch. Their overhead was out of control. Reimbursement was a farce. And they were very much struggling and they needed something to identify with, to know that their specialty was in the game and advocating on their behalf. \n\nMelton: I bet the Academy is the only medical association that publishes two professional journals much less three. I don’t know of any other specialty that does that. The closest might be something like American Heart [Association] that has several publications or American Diabetes [Association] that has several publications. But those are not the specialty organizations. Those are more the avenue organizations. \n\nHasser: Joetta and I just wanted one of everything.\n\nMelton: And in the end we got one of everything. Clayton participated in the early research and the early negotiations for the launch of Annals of Family Medicine. That was an interesting process because that again really demonstrated what is possible when the six organizations share a common goal. In this case, the discipline had strong [Journal of] Family Practice, was really about the only research journal for family medicine. And [Dowden?] Publishing owns Journal of Family Practice and at the time, this would have been 2000, there were feelings that [Dowden?] as a for-profit owner of Journal of Family Practice would move to shift the focus of Journal of Family Practice away from original research and more towards reviews like are contained in American Family Physician. The reason being, original research is not attractive to advertisers to support. They would much rather support journals that are very well-read. And frankly, review journals are much better read than original research articles or original research journals. Do [Dowden?] was struggling financially and they wanted to shift Journal of Family Practice away from original research for its review in order to attract more advertising. And at the same time they had fired their medical editor. They had fired two medical editors because neither medical editor wanted to participate in that shift. So the discipline was feeling very threatened that at some point as a discipline family medicine was not going to have an outlet for original research to be published. Certainly family physicians could submit their research to JAMA or to New England or any number of second- or third-tier research journals. But frankly it had to do with the identity and the success or coming of age of the specialty to have its own research journals. We started with three organizations (both the [American] Board and STFM) and the Academy. And then got agreement that if we launched a research journal, we certainly did not want it to be competitive with either AFP or FPM in terms of ad dollars. And STFM had the concern that they would not want the new research journal to be competitive with Family Medicine from an articles perspective. Certainly we would not want to publish educational research in the new journal Annals. And Family Medicine also had a reasonably healthy classified advertising department and they were concerned that Annals would take away classified ads. So we crafted an agreement between the three organizations that helped protect STFM classified advertising and certainly carved out educational research as the realm of Family Medicine. But other research could be placed in Annals. And when we got started and were talking more, somebody said why wouldn’t the Association of the Departments of Family Medicine or the Residency Directors want to participate in this? So we invited them and they said sure and they bought into it.             \n\nHasser: Are they funders still?\n\nMelton: Yes. And NAPCRG as well. ABFM, AFMRD and NAPCRG each have a fixed dollar amount that they contribute each year. The three larger organizations: the Academy, the ABFM and STFM are percentage contributions. But it really has been a terrific, very successful vehicle for the discipline. It has been available in print to any of the members of the six organizations or I think if you are a diplomate of the [American] Board, you can request a free print subscription to it. When we launched, the first issue went to every member of the Academy and every member of the other organizations as well. So that was about 75,000 copies for the first issue. And then after that we dropped back where we were only automatically sending it to second- and third-year residents and STFM members. And anybody else that requested, they could get a free copy if they asked for it. \n\nHasser: So they could get a free subscription?\n\nMelton: Yes, they could.\n\nHasser: They still can get free subscriptions?\n\nMelton: They could for print up until this last issue, November/December ’06. Now from now on there are now more free print subscriptions. The only way you can get a print copy is to pay a subscription fee for it. But everything is freely available online. So anybody who is interested in the content of Annals can go online and read it anytime and print it out if they want to. But the six organizations are not paying anymore for free print subscriptions. Like a member of the Academy, if he or she chooses to get a print subscription, they can get it at a discount. But that will be a very small number. We think starting in January of ’07 our press run instead of being, we had reduced it down to about 2,000 in ’06, now in ’07 our press run will probably be 500, if we’re lucky. It will probably be closer to 300. \n\nHasser: So it basically will end up to be on online journal.\n\nMelton: An online-only journal. And that’s the way we started it. The philosophy for the journal from the beginning was that it was going to be an online journal and oh, by the way, there’s also a print copy that you can get. Because we knew eventually we would discontinue print.\n\nLet me segue into my next question which is what is your sense of where family medicine is going in general and family medicine publications are going to be headed in the future?\n\nHasser: I’m bowing out of this discussion because I’m gone for five years.    \n\nIn this five year period, have you been surprised at the changes? Did you expect to see what has occurred in the last five years?  \n\nHasser: Do you mean as far as... \n\nAs far as the publishing.  \n\nHasser: I think I probably would not have perceived the demise or near demise of our former competitors. I think we certainly foresaw us getting ahead of them but not only has AFP, for example, and now FPM experienced the growth that it has but it is now practically untouchable. And the people that we used to compete against, two of them don’t exist anymore. One is just a former shadow of itself because they got fewer and fewer for a number of reasons, the availability, how many advertising pages were being placed. And for a number of reasons, because of the changes in the pharmaceutical market, that just decreased. And AFP, because of the quality and because of the association the Academy, because of the incredible leadership, has the competitive edge.\n\nMelton: Another part of the contribution to the death of those publications is that each of those publications was owned and operated by for-profit companies. And you can almost pinpoint the moment in time when a for-profit company says to itself we want to sell this publication, we want to sell this division or whatever. Maybe they have a healthcare division and a computer division and a dental division and something else. We want to sell off the healthcare division and there’s maybe three publications in the healthcare division. You can pinpoint almost to the minute when they make that decision because they cease to invest in the property. And what that means is they are attempting in every way possible to make that division or that publication as attractive to potential buyers as possible without spending any more money on it.\n\nHasser: Their budgets became so tight, they could not put out the quality in it and they weren’t serving the reader.\n\nMelton: They weren’t serving the reader. And once you stop serving the reader, the readership numbers go down, you get fewer pages. And when you have fewer ad pages, there’s less content because content and advertising is also in a strict ratio. And it becomes a vicious downward spiral. We sat and we watched Patient Care, for example, Clayton’s former publication, the last six years we have watched it literally each year have 50% fewer ad pages than it had the year before. Well, when you go half, half, half, I mean you’ve heard about the half-life of plutonium or whatever – at some point, it disappears. And frankly what they’d had to do is completely abandon the concept of Patient Care as a multispecialty publication. Going to a large audience of well over 180 [thousand?], they’re down to subspecialty editions aimed at, I think there’s like four of them, Diabetes and…anyway, they’ve completely thrown out the multispecialty concept and are almost a custom publishing. And that happened, first of all Medical Economics, Patient Care, was getting everything ready and then Thomson bought those. And then Thomson kept for a couple of years and then decided that they wanted to focus on their financial divisions and get rid of the healthcare division. And you could see at that point then, Thomson stopped investing in Medical Economics and Patient Care and Drug Topics, etc.\n\nHasser: At least Thomson, a publishing company, and many of the journals started to be owned by people whose primary business was not necessarily publishing.\n\nMelton: Exactly, so the bean counters were in control. And when the bean control counters control a publishing operation, they’re looking only at the bottom line, what’s best for the shareholders.\n\nHasser: And I don’t think we ever felt that we had anybody squeezing us on our budget. So I swear that we were both extremely fiscally responsible. Nobody got fired around here unless there was a really good reason.\n\nLet me ask you both this: What advice would you give to a new employee coming into the Academy, coming into your division so that they would be successful?\n\nMelton: First of all, I would hope that if a new employee were coming into the Academy obviously he or she has already been through the recruiting and interviewing process and somebody’s made a decision that this person is a fit for both skills and experience and culture. So assuming that that decision has already been made, I’d say expand your skills, look for every opportunity to learn about not just with family medicine but look for every opportunity to learn about trends in publishing, publishing period. Because you can learn things from say the publishing of a computer magazine that can be turned around and applied to publishing of a medical journal. Look for opportunities to network, for opportunities to grow. \n\nClayton, any thoughts on that?\n\nHasser: Oh, absolutely (inaudible). \n\nTo follow up on that, do you have any advice for your successors, those coming in? Anything you would like to impart for them?\n\nMelton: There are two things. When I announced my retirement, when I told Michael that I was retiring, and we had talked about this for a long time before I actually gave him a date, I said that there are two things that I do not want the next Publisher to monkey with. And one of them is the New Jersey Sales Office. The quickest way to destroy a successful advertising sales effort as AFP/FPM are is for a Publisher to constantly be looking over the shoulder of the salesperson and say okay, who are you going to go see today and what are you going to talk about? That sales operation, the salespeople need to feel as though they are I control of their lives, in control of their clients and the relationships that they have with those clients. And we have a marvelously stable New Jersey Sales Office.\n\nHasser: And the ---- Sales staff is the key.\n\nMelton: It is absolutely. And Dan Gowan has been there seventeen years and he’s the longest longevity there. But I said to Michael, please emphasize to the new Publisher that the New Jersey Sales Office requires a level of autonomy and independence in order to operate very well. And it would not be false autonomy either because they really are very well-qualified to do their jobs and independent. And the other thing I asked was that the new Publisher not monkey with the classified advertising.\n\nHasser: A quite little gold mine.\n\nMelton: Yes. We have an agent in Florida, Russell Johns Advertising, and they sell our what they call “small space ads,” the word ads, classified advertising in the back of AFP/FPM and online and that’s a marvelous thing. For every issue they deliver the pages to us and they send us a check and all we do is publish the pages. They keep renewing the contract; it’s marvelous. It’s a great relationship. So those were my two conditions and Michael agreed with both of them. And as a result, we named Dan Gowan Associate Publisher. And previously, up until about a week ago, he had just been Director of Advertising Sales for AFP. And what we’ve done is name him Associate Publisher for both AFP and FPM. So now the AFP sales buys report to Dan as they have in the past but also FPM, the Director of Sales for Joe Beck reports in to Dan. So Dan really is the head of the New Jersey Office and that really emphasizes the autonomy of it.\n\nHasser: Do we even do account reviews anymore? \n\nMelton: No, not very often. \n\nHasser: In the old days, we used to do account reviews on a biannual basis. And Joetta and I would go to New Jersey and we would sit in the office and go through their performances, the pages that had come in. And Joetta did up spreadsheets about their pages and about the competitors’ pages, or at least we described what service they did. And went through account by account by account and I always looked at what the competitors were doing. And they would indicate why they weren’t getting all of the pages – and those were painful.\n\nMelton: They’re very much shortened now. We do an account review now with Sales. We bring the salespeople to Kansas City twice a year because they enjoy coming to Kansas City. When we do an account review, we can usually do each territory in about ten minutes. Because really all they have to do is talk about the accounts…the only account they have to talk about is where they are not getting market share or where there are some unusual condition or circumstance. And frankly we are getting it all. Talking about classified advertising, do you remember when we talked about bringing classified advertising in-house? \n\nHasser: Very briefly, right?\n\nMelton: Yeah. This was in our young, foolish days. We were going to fire Russell Johns and bring classified advertising in-house because we thought we could do it much more profitably in-house. But after due consideration and talking to Russell Johns about what all was involved and how many extra staff we would have to hire to do the telemarketing and everything here, we finally said you can keep doing it.   \n\nHasser: The other thing we ought to mention very quickly is the Special Projects Division which we were excited to do because we looked around the Academy in the early years and saw that a lot of divisions were doing the old kind of publications ----. And we thought we had the expertise and the professionalism here and that it would be good to provide a service to the other divisions of editing and publishing and they would be the content experts and so forth. And so that worked out nicely. \n\nMelton: We actually just started with one Special Projects Editor and it grew into a department of Publishing. And then we spun that off, it became the Special Projects Division and then Online and Custom Publishing is what it is now. A totally separate division but still report to Michael now.   \n\nI would like to switch gears a little bit and talk about life after the Academy. Clayton, since you’ve been retired for five years, my understanding is you’re heavily involved in humanitarian efforts in Africa?\n\nHasser: I have been heavily involved in international development work. And a lot of that has been in Africa. And I caught the bug for doing this when I was at the Academy and went on a Physicians with Heart trip with Dan Ostergaard and we went to Armenia. And I absolutely was captivated by the ability to touch people’s lives and get to know someone that maybe you couldn’t even speak their language and to meet people on a soul-to-soul, human-to-human basis when all the trappings of class and money and those types of things are removed. So I decided that that’s what I wanted to do when I retired. And I did go to Africa and was there for nine months as project director for two clinics and an orphanage. And then when I came back and thought that I might not do something else that was long-term, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was going to do and got involved in some volunteer activities. Then I ended up doing a lot of work for my church and establish mission relationships so that we do those kinds of things but more on a short-term basis. And provide some funding but basically go in and develop relationships and partnerships. We now have one in South Africa, we have a partnership with Nicaragua, we have a partnership with an Indian reservation in South Dakota and we had two trips to New Orleans. And we did all of that within two years. Now we’re on our second round of all of those trips. So it’s new kinds of doing mission work where you don’t do Santa Claus stuff. You go in and you might do a work project but you do relationships and people ----. This has grown out of my experience with the Academy too…I also do volunteer work a half-day a week with the Kansas City Free Health Clinic which provides clinical services to the underinsured. And I’m a patient assistant in their general medicine clinic one day a week. I pretend I’m a clinician without going to school. So I take their vital signs and their history and sometimes have to bite my tongue to keep from telling the doctor, I think you really ought to consider X, Y and Z. But I absolutely love it because they serve the working poor. There are now 55 million people who are either uninsured or underinsured. And most of these are people that were school bus drivers, people that work at Einstein Brothers, those kinds of places where they don’t get medical insurance at all. But they are working; we call those the working poor. Not the Medicare or the Medicaid people, the people who are uninsured or underinsured. And it’s just very fulfilling and I really, really enjoy it. And I have a job.\n\nYou have a regular job?  \n\nAs a former VP, I’m not a clerk. I decided to do it; I needed some structure. So I have this job two times a week. It has maybe something to do with my skill level but nothing to do with any of my interests. I work for a financial company that does leasing agreements. But I really enjoy it because I enjoy going somewhere and seeing people because I live alone with an animal. And I have a lot of money for international travel, which I love. By the way, I used to want to be a foreign correspondent. Obviously, I never became one. So I use that to travel. I don’t make much money but I don’t have much stress either. \n\nJoetta, do you have any plans for retirement?\n\nMelton: I’m a licensed AKC dog show judge, so I’m going to continue judging dog shows occasionally. I don’t know how often that will happen. When some local club somewhere around the country needs a judge for Sharpies or Whippets. I am planning on doing a lot of reading, a lot of needlepointing. \n\nHasser: Joetta and I read a lot. \n\nMelton: And I really about a month or six weeks ago was beginning to look in my planner and look at January and there wasn’t very much there. The calendar was kind of empty. Usually in the past years by the first of November I’ve got meetings and travel plans for January al l the way up through June and things going on. I really have been surprised that I’ve had a number of requests to do some consulting projects and have actually worked on one in the evenings already that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. So I may do some more consulting, but nothing full-time probably. We’ll see what materializes. I’m in a very fortunate situation where I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. The Academy has been very generous to me over the years. 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