When the Rivertowns Enterprise folded in January 2024, Allison Stuntz Schulte wondered how to fill the sudden news vacuum in Westchester County, New York. The four local towns the Enterprise served—Ardsley, Hastings-on-Hudson, Irvington, and Dobbs Ferry, where she lives with her husband and three children—needed a paper that would both provide quality local journalism and remain financially viable. Schulte left her position as global head of data and audience at Bloomberg Media to launch the Rivertowns Dispatch.
Her years of engagement experience proved vital to the paper’s transition from print advertising as its sole source of revenue. “I learned you can’t just tie it to one thing,” Schulte says. “Not being dogmatic” about where revenue comes from is crucial, she says. For example, the paper hosts events and markets its classified ads to younger readers as a kind of social media.
“Allison has a vision,” says Dispatch head of design Christy Knell. “She sees how the paper can connect members of the community by telling them more about each other.” Schulte learned to embrace risk and local journalism during college. “Dartmouth made so many different opportunities available to try in lower-risk ways,” she says, which paved the way for her current endeavor. Besides a summer internship at a local paper in Mississippi, she participated in a program in which students visited inmates at an Upper Valley prison. One term, Schulte and others helped inmates start their own newspaper. “Let’s get your ideas down on paper and see what that looks like” was her initial thought.
That dedication to amplifying community voices, a founding principle of the Dispatch, has not gone unnoticed. “I’ve never had [a product] before where people stop me in the street and say, ‘Thank you for doing this,’ ” Schulte reflects. “I’m humbled and grateful for the strong positive community response.”
