American Hometown Media (AHM) is a digital media company. Based in Nashville, Tenn., AHM transfers traditional publishing DNA to internet platforms featuring food, lifestyle, tech, beauty and news. We capitalize on our years of diverse media experience to empower online publishers and influencers with a suite of next-generation products and services focused on content, monetization, and technology.
Our owned and operated food site, Just A Pinch Recipes, maintains the largest collection of user-submitted recipes on the web. Just A Pinch turns home cooks into celebrities and awards real Blue Ribbons for outstanding dishes while receiving numerous national and international recognition for design structure, navigation, user interface, community, social networking and people’s choice.
Putting the spotlight on these heroes is the “secret sauce” that propels us.
Our History
1998:
Dan Hammond founded Publishing Group of America (PGOA) and launch of American Profile magazine, the largest successful magazine launch in U.S. history. It was followed by Relish magazine, the largest epicurean magazine in the U.S., and Spry Magazine the largest health, wellness and lifestyle magazine. All three publications distributed primarily through the community newspapers nationwide to nearly 20% of all U.S. households. Those publications became the third, fourth and fifth largest magazines in the country respectively. He also created Hometown Content, the first syndicated content service for community newspapers and developed a channel for promotional advertisers to reach Neilson C&D America. Hammond and company sold Publishing Group of America to Bain Capital and Shamrock Capital Partners in November of 2007.
2005:
Before selling Publishing Group of America Hammond founded and launched American Hometown Publishing (AHP), which acquired and managed local community newspapers by forming partnerships with local publishers. Through these efforts, AHP helped improve business operations, profits and readership among its papers. AHP was one of the largest owners of community newspapers in the Southeastern U.S. based in Tennessee.
It was inside AHP that Hammond and team incubated Just A Pinch Recipes, one of the first Vertical Social Networks around food and now the largest repository of user-posted recipes world-wide. In taking the DNA of user-generated recipes employed in American Profile magazine, and bringing it to the digital world, Just A Pinch was born and now is one of the largest food sites not owned by a major media entity. Utilizing the readers of the AHP community papers as Alpha and Beta testers in late 2010, Justapinch.com launched in the first quarter of 2011 and spun out into American Hometown Media, Inc. in 2012.
2009:
Doli Stepniewski joined the team inside AHP to build the digital architecture of Justapinch.com. He oversaw every aspect of the site’s engineering creating a true Vertical Social Network design.
Previously Stepniewski served as the Chief Architect of Echomusic, LLC, an entertainment marketing entity supporting fan clubs for all genre of music artists. His custom web and database applications have powered millions of consumer records in numerous industries. Ticketmaster acquired Echo in 2007.
2016:
Mike Meyers joined Hammond, Stepniewski and team in 2016 to bring a digital monetization and technology platform to successfully monetize Just A Pinch and broaden the company’s tech assets offerings and network monetization services.
Myers previously was the founding CEO for SheKnows, LLC in 1999, one of the largest women’s lifestyle digital sites, operator of BlogHer, a monetization and support network for food bloggers and influencers and one of the first advertising networks in the U.S. He was at the forefront of digital media sites capturing the promise of online advertising monetization. SheKnows was sold to Evolve Media in 2012.
He subsequently ran all the operations and digital monetization efforts for the networks of Woman’s Forum and Glam Media (formerly Mode Media).
Today:
The confluence of these three backgrounds have led to what American Hometown Media is today. A digital media company comprised of 1) owned & operated food sites; 2) a Premium Partner Group monetization platform for food and non-food sites; and CuratorCrowd, a technology asset division.