“I am a true believer in local news.”
Allison Schulte ’02 didn’t want her community to become a news desert, so she took on the challenge of establishing a weekly paper.
As 2024 began, Allison (Stuntz) Schulte ’02 was enjoying her job as global head of data and audience at Bloomberg Media and didn’t have any plans to change careers. Then her hometown newspaper, which served four Westchester County communities, announced it was going out of business.
When a hometown newspaper shutters its operations, the closure often creates a “news desert” where no dependable local news coverage is available. Schulte was determined that would not happen in her community. She wondered if she could create a new model for local news coverage, one that would focus exclusively on the four towns and invite community involvement. Supported by friends and family and surmounting multiple “steep learning curves,” she launched The Rivertowns Dispatch.
Schulte has spent her career in and around media. She started as a blogger on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign; worked at a political polling firm; moved into technology advertising, which led to startup experience; and later joined Bloomberg Media. She and her husband Ben live in Dobbs Ferry, one of the four towns covered by The Dispatch, with their three children. Here, she shares the challenges and rewards of starting a newspaper.
What prompted you to establish The Rivertowns Dispatch?
I am a true believer in local news. If it’s done right, local news is fun, personal, and engaging. It connects the community and brings transparency to local government and schools. I believe people naturally want to know what’s going on around them—in their neighborhoods, on their streets, and at their schools. The demand is there, the model is just broken.
When I was at Dartmouth, I spent one summer working at a local newspaper in Mississippi. Among my responsibilities, I got to write a daily profile of an area resident, which ran on the front of the B section. I could choose literally anyone in the county to interview, figure out their story, and publish it. I wrote about donut store owners, hospice workers, and Little League coaches. People were thrilled to read their stories in print and loved to read about their neighbors. My love of local news took off.
Fast forward to last year when our local newspaper closed. A friend of mine who used to work at Wired and I decided there was a real opportunity here. I’m not a journalist, but I’ve spent most of my time working in media on the business side of things. I started putting together profit and loss scenarios. I had spent some time at startups; I knew how to do a rough pitch. We did a small friends and family round to get going.
What was your pitch?
That the local news model is broken, and here’s an opportunity to fix it. We can make a newspaper that is modern, fun, and interactive—and drive revenue from subscriptions, ads, events, and listings and experiment till we find the right mix. We put together enough money from people locally and former work colleagues to open the doors of The Dispatch. I brought in the editor from the previous paper, The Rivertowns Enterprise, for editorial continuity. We started with an email newsletter last May and launched print last September.
Has it been a hard sell?
The area we cover is a smart, professional, engaged community. I haven’t had to sell the importance of local news. Even so, for the paper to be successful, it must be important to the community, and there must be a personal connection so people are excited when this thing shows up in their mailbox every week.
How are you getting people excited about The Dispatch?
It’s crucial that we cover the town and school board meetings. Then there’s this additional layer of fun—the personal stories of your community. Everyone wants to see themselves and their kids reflected in the paper. I have a goal to put every single person in the Rivertowns in the newspaper at some point.
We look for ways to get the community participating in the paper as well. For example, we do a poll in each issue of The Dispatch, and then we put the responses on the cover of next week’s paper.
We have a mentoring program for high school students with a couple of area journalists who volunteer to teach kids how to research and report a story. We work with an after-school program for elementary school kids that does the same thing.
Do you cover anything beyond your four communities?
No, but we will run stories featuring local reactions to what’s happening outside our towns. One example: the impact of changing tariff policy on our small businesses. We did a feature this summer asking local small businesses where they get supplies from overseas and how they’re planning for changing tariffs. We had a visual showing the supply paths of our local cheese shop, acupuncturist, coffee shop, and others. We wanted to bring that global story down to our streets and neighborhoods.
With so many people consuming news online today, why the commitment to print?
There were three factors. The obvious one, nostalgia—we had senior citizens knocking on my door saying, “You need to make this thing print.” A second, more interesting factor was thinking about parents sharing their enthusiasm for local news with their children. I wanted something that I could leave on the kitchen counter and my kids could pick up. I listen to podcasts, and I read The New York Times on my phone. But that’s not ambient media—it’s not something that’s just there for my kids to pick up and read.
The third factor is the ritual of reading print, which I love. Ben and I moved here nine years ago because we loved this community. With two little kids at the time, now three, I didn’t have enough time to engage in the community. On Saturday mornings, however, I loved to sit on the couch and go through the local newspaper and nurture that connection to my community.
What have been the biggest challenges of the past year?
There have been steep learning curves in so many areas. Probably about 20 percent of being a publisher I knew pretty well coming in, such as how to set up an advertising program and how to build a website. But the craft of creating a print newspaper—like how images reproduce well in newsprint, or how one obtains a periodical mailing permit from the post office—were things I learned on the job.
How has the community responded to The Dispatch?
We’ve had an enthusiastic response from both subscribers and advertisers. We have about 1,800 households subscribing one year in, and our goal is 3,000.
What’s at the heart of your relationship with your readers?
With the internet, people have endless choices for receiving news. We’re not going back to when newspapers had a geographic monopoly. That means local publishers like me must produce a news product that people choose to consume. I believe people will make that choice every time, but we need to show the community why professional journalism is different and better than me just blogging my opinions of the village board meeting. Professional journalists research topics, develop sources, and create a shared set of facts for the community to then create their opinions on top of. That leads to more productive discussion and a more engaged and tighter-knit community.
Did Dartmouth help prepare you for the challenges of the past year?
Dartmouth was a safe space to take risks and try out different ideas. For example, I tutored inmates at the Woodstock and Windsor prisons. Some of the inmates said they wanted to tell people what was going on in the prisons, so I helped them start a newspaper. It helped me see that journalism was not only this elite thing. The inmates I worked with cared deeply about both the craft of writing and reporting and were so proud of the handful of issues we photocopied and shared.
You’re both an entrepreneur and a publisher. Are you enjoying the experience?
This is the most fun I’ve had in a job. It is also the most personal. I’m proud to create something valuable for my community, and I’m having fun with the experiment. You need to be nimble, willing to try different things, knowing that some will work and some won’t. That’s a really good challenge for a cause I believe in.
If The Dispatch is a success, could you imagine owning other papers?
Maybe. The plan is to get this going, then after two years step back and ask, “Did we figure out a good model here? Is this something that grows farther?” If the answers are yes, we may want to make it work in other places. I believe reader demand is there, which is the most important part.
More than 3,200 newspapers across the U.S. have closed since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. Each closure eroded the sense of community for a town or region. In addition to establishing a new hometown newspaper, Schulte is raising awareness about the loss of local news sources. The Rivertowns Dispatch regularly produces podcasts on topics of local interest, and a recent episode focused on the importance of community news.