Just last week, the towns along the river just north of New York City got a brand new newspaper, the kind you actually can open up on the kitchen table and get your fingertips stained just a bit with ink while reading it over a well-made cup of coffee.
The Rivertowns Dispatch printed and shipped its inaugural version on September 6th, 2024.
Just look at this beauty!
Here's a little video of the the Dispatch's first print run:
Allison Schulte is the paper's founder and publisher. She's an unlikely candidate for launching a physical paper. Previously, she worked as the global head of data and audience for a little media operation known as Bloomberg Media, which is about as digital as it comes.
But she saw that her community and the ones around it were not being served well by legacy news outlets, and she wanted to launch a real paper with a corresponding digital presence.
From Rivertowns Dispatch's About Us page:
We believe that newspapers can be fun. We’ll be playing with imagery, data visualization and design to make the Rivertowns come alive on the page.
We believe that there is value in creating community at a hyper-local level. This value benefits residents, businesses, and municipalities.
The Rivertowns Dispatch covers news for the towns of Ardsley, Dobbs Ferry, Hastings-on-Hudson, Irvington, and the surrounding region just north of New York City up the Hudson river.
For the current low price of $100, residents get a newspaper delivered to their house once a week for a year. Supporting members at the $250 tier get some nice swag, a shout-out on the website and a meeting with the editorial team.
We at Outpost were stupidly excited to help behind the scenes to help make this launch work.
Ghost is an excellent choice for the Dispatch, for a number of reasons, but mainly because Ghost's superpower is that memberships are at the heart of Ghost.
Memberships aren't some add-on built by some other company that works on top of or external to your publishing system (cough:Wordpress:cough). Memberships are built right-in to the heart of Ghost, which architecturally makes sense if you are running a media business centered on subscriptions.
But a little customization was needed. Ghost's native checkout is geared toward digital subs, so it doesn't ask for a shipping address (which is not always the same as the billing address).
So Outpost built a custom membership checkout flow for the Dispatch to make it easy to pay, while also capturing mailing addresses and allowing people to use discount codes when appropriate.
Additionally, the Dispatch wanted to get subscribers signed up with credit cards ready to go before the first print run.
But it did not want to actually charge or start the subscription until the first papers were printed.
So we built a pre-launch checkout system to securely save the subscriber info, payment details, and relevant discount codes until it was time to charge them. And that worked a charm.
This isn't Outpost's first digital + print member publication (that's probably the very cool Australian magazine Galah), but it's the first where we removed the need for a service like Shopify to handle the print subscription backend work.
In the build for the Dispatch, all the relevant info for the newspaper subscriptions lives in Stripe (the payment processor), and paid subscribers get corresponding privileges on the website. That means Stripe is the source of truth for getting the list of currently paying subscribers and their addresses to the printer.
This is ideal since that puts the mailing data in the same place as the data for the website's subscriptions. That also keeps the Dispatch from being locked into Outpost (vendor lock-in isn't something we believe in).
Outpost also did some other work for the site like building some ad slots in the online theme, and we created a new variant for sponsorships in the newsletters, which we think looks quite nice.
And finally, Allison hasn't given up on her digital data roots, so Outpost is helping fill a data pond with relevant data about subscriptions, website usage and more, so that she can do the kind of deep data analysis for the Dispatch that she did for Bloomberg.
You might think that a physical newspaper is passe or even kitchsy in the digital age, but Rivertowns Dispatch isn't an exercise in nostalgia.
Print can still matter and the Dispatch a thoroughly modern operation. It's built on a top-notch and architecturally sound tech stack that's both effective and cost-effective. And I can't wait to see what happens once Allison gets some time to start analyzing the data.
When Allison first started talking with Outpost and told us about the plans, we couldn't help but continually exclaim, "You're making a newspaper!"
And, yes, yes, she did!
