Concentrate
Concentrate is a weekly online magazine covering Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County, Michigan, published at concentratemedia.com by Issue Media Group. Launched in March 2008, it reports on development, innovation, small business, culture and the people shaping the Ann Arbor area — including Ypsilanti and the county's smaller communities — from a deliberately positive, solutions-oriented perspective. Concentrate was an early member of Issue Media Group's family of Michigan magazines, joining Detroit's Model D and southeast Michigan's Metromode, and it has published through the transformation of both its city and its industry: Ann Arbor's growth as a technology and university hub, the contraction of traditional local media, and its parent company's evolution from a Detroit startup into a multi-state network acquired by Fourth Estate in 2024.
Launch in March 2008
Concentrate's first issue went online on 27 March 2008, an arrival noted at the time by local blogs welcoming a new place to learn what was happening in Ann Arbor. It arrived as a free online magazine from the team behind Metromode and Model D, applying to Washtenaw County the formula Issue Media Group had developed in Detroit: a weekly digital publication focused on growth, innovation and the people creating a sense of place. At launch, Newcombe Clark filled the publisher role; Jeff Meyers served as managing editor and Dave Lewinski as managing photographer, with interim publisher Ashley Aidenbaum succeeding Clark in the magazine's first period.
The timing is significant. Concentrate launched on the eve of the financial crisis and just before the Ann Arbor News, the city's longtime daily, closed in 2009. A magazine built to chronicle development and new-economy jobs in a university city was about to become part of a much thinner local media landscape than the one it had planned for.
A Magazine About Where Ann Arbor Is Headed
Concentrate has explained its own brief with unusual candour. In an editorial setting out its approach, the magazine said traditional media's predominant narrative was not oriented toward tracking where the community was heading, how it benchmarked against national and global trends in culture, lifestyle, business and development, or who its emerging thought leaders were — and that this was precisely what Concentrate existed to do. It does not endorse individual businesses, developers or politicians; it is interested in how they represent the direction of the Ann Arbor area.
The values behind that brief were listed openly: urban density, sustainability, regional cooperation, economic and cultural diversity, green spaces, higher education, mass transit, entrepreneurship and technological innovation were named as keys to the community's success, and the magazine pledged to write doggedly about the people, businesses and projects reflecting those trends. That transparency about perspective is part of the Issue Media Group model — a positive, solutions-oriented approach, offered, as Concentrate put it, not without critique or context.
The 'Growth, Not Loss' Editorial Model
Community descriptions of Concentrate summarise the Issue Media formula as providing the other side of local economic news: plant closings and layoffs were considered sufficiently covered by traditional media, so these publications concentrated on innovations, innovators, artists, developments and growth. A contemporary account of Concentrate's launch made the same point in marketing terms — traditional media had made a business of loss, while Concentrate would make a business of growth: growing companies, investment in cities, and the thought leaders creating an authentic sense of place.
One feature embodied that stance. Concentrate's Jobs Landed section published thumbnail profiles and photographs of young talent and the positions they had recently taken locally, a direct rebuttal, the magazine argued, to the common wisdom in Michigan that no quality jobs existed for college-educated talent. The magazine conceded the job market was difficult, but insisted the overriding narrative of no jobs at all was simply untrue, pointing to the hiring stories it unearthed every week.
Coverage Across Washtenaw County
Although Ann Arbor is its centre of gravity, Concentrate's territory is Washtenaw County. Its own partner materials describe it as a Washtenaw County institution and the trusted digital source for what is next in its communities, covering Ann Arbor's development landscape and Ypsilanti's creative scene alike. In its redesign announcement the magazine reminded readers that they were part of where Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Chelsea, Dexter and Saline were heading, and its city pages were built to connect readers with the latest news from each place.
Subject matter spans the county's defining institutions and industries: the University of Michigan and higher education, technology startups and software companies, downtown development, the arts — an early first-issue feature profiled the Ann Arbor Film Festival's executive director — food businesses, sustainability projects and the small firms that give each community its character.
Format, Community and Events
Concentrate is a weekly online magazine with a newsletter, historically publishing its new issue mid-week and later moving to post stories throughout the week. A redesign roughly three and a half years after launch added comments to every story, photographs alongside features — including the work of photographer Doug Coombe — a Focus On section, top-ten feature lists and improved city pages, as the magazine shifted from a single weekly drop to more continuous publishing.
The magazine also convened its readers in person. Its Great Places speaker series, run with partners, brought experts and local panels to discuss the future of downtown Ann Arbor; one 2012 session, held with Ann Arbor's Downtown Development Authority, featured planning consultant Todd Poole of 4ward Planning alongside downtown business leaders including representatives of Domino's Farms, HookLogic, Menlo Innovations and Arbormoon Software, moderated by John Petz. Events of that kind turned the magazine's editorial agenda — density, downtown vitality, talent retention — into a public conversation.
Issue Media Group, the Parent Network
Concentrate's publisher, Issue Media Group, was incorporated in Detroit in 2005 by Brian Boyle and Paul Schutt, launching with Model D and growing into a network of weekly digital magazines practising solutions-based, narrative journalism. Schutt, a co-founder and co-owner based in the Ann Arbor–Saline area along with another co-founder, was a public face of the company in Michigan — a 2011 Ann Arbor Observer profile was headlined, aptly for the model, 'Happy Talk — Paul Schutt sells the state good news.' IMG was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, ranking 1,672 in the list reported by Concentrate itself.
IMG publications are funded through a combination of underwriting contracts and grants, and are wholly editorially independent. The network's twelve Michigan magazines, Concentrate among them, later joined the Michigan Press Association, and in August 2024 IMG was acquired by Fourth Estate Inc., a public benefit journalism organisation, with John Montgomery becoming chief executive and the founders remaining to support the transition.
Partnerships and How Concentrate Is Supported
Concentrate's current partner page presents the magazine to prospective underwriters and advertisers as Washtenaw County's trusted voice: a leading source of information for the county, a proven authority in local search on the people, businesses and projects shaping the region, and a curated audience of engaged residents, influencers and decision-makers. Partnership opportunities include underwriting, branded content, website display advertising, newsletter advertising and sponsorships, and custom content collaborations.
That page captures the economics of the model precisely. Concentrate is free to readers; its revenue comes from organisations that want to support, and be associated with, coverage of the county's future. The editorial independence policy that governs all IMG titles is the counterweight, ensuring that underwriters support coverage areas rather than direct them.
Concentrate and Ann Arbor's Changing Media Landscape
Concentrate's longevity is part of its story. It launched weeks before the collapse of the region's economic assumptions in 2008, published through the closure of the Ann Arbor News and the rise and fall of successor experiments, and continued while Ann Arbor's technology sector, downtown and university expanded. Over that span, the question it was founded to answer — where is this community heading? — only became more central, as debates over housing, density, transit and growth intensified in one of Michigan's most prosperous but pressured cities.
Its approach has always invited debate: an openly positive lens is a choice, and Concentrate has defended it as a corrective rather than a denial, arguing that growth stories were the under-reported side of the local record. Readers can judge that claim against a now-substantial archive stretching back to March 2008.
Why Concentrate Matters
Concentrate matters as an early, durable example of a different way of organising local journalism: free, weekly, digital, funded by underwriting rather than subscriptions, and organised around a community's future rather than its daily incidents. Along with Model D, Metromode, Rapid Growth and Flintside, it helped demonstrate that small online magazines, networked together, could sustain local storytelling after the economics of the metropolitan daily collapsed.
For Washtenaw County specifically, it provides a continuous record of development, entrepreneurship and cultural life across Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and the county's smaller towns — the kind of record whose absence, in so many American communities, is only noticed when it is gone.
Concentrate Today
Today Concentrate continues to publish online as an Issue Media Group magazine under Fourth Estate ownership, covering development, innovation, business and culture across Washtenaw County, and inviting partnerships through its website. Readers can find it at its official website, concentratemedia.com, where its current features, county coverage and newsletter are available free — in keeping with the open, underwriting-supported model on which it launched in 2008.
