NewsBeat

January 2018 NewsBeat 21 who reports, writes, and lays out the paper in her home office in Mahopac, New York, she is also the photographer and occasional delivery person. "He's always open to ideas, which is fantastic." Stone fell in love with print as a college sophomore at Hofstra, when his public relations teacher suggested he might prefer journalism. He turned the school magazine into an award- winning publication. "I liked having my fingerprints on something I helped to create." In 2001, after graduating, he moved to Mount Kisco to be near his girlfriend (now wife), Alyson, who is from Pleasantville, and went to work for Gannett, the 900-pound gorilla of the Westchester County newspaper scene. In the late 1990s, Gannett had folded nine of its local titles and created the Journal News in 2000, after losing local ad revenue, Gannett resurrected five of those titles as community weeklies, including The Star in Peekskill, where Stone did man on the street interviews and covered city hall. In 2002, after a brief stint as a staff reporter at the Times Herald-Record in Sullivan County, he took a job at the now- defunct North County News in Yorktown, the venerable weekly published by Chase Media Group, owner of the PennySaver. Martin Wilbur, then North County News's assistant editor, became Stone's advisor and friend. "I've seen reporters who were confident to the point of cocky, but Adam was never that way," he says. "When he didn't know something, he wasn't afraid to ask questions, and that's one of the best qualities a journalist can have. Sometimes you can get pretty lost when you're talking about sewer and storm water management." Stone loved his job and North County News, particularly the collegial newsroom atmosphere and the editorial freedom he was afforded. But all that changed in 2006, when its founder, John W. Chase, passed away and one of his daughters took the reins. The controversial regime change came with dress codes and goal sheets. Many staffers chafed at the new doctrinaire climate, and a mass exodus began, including Stone. "Most reporters aren't of that personality, so I had to haul ass out of there." Stone went freelance and did well, writing for national outlets like the New York Times, Inc. magazine, and the Real Deal, a real estate trade publication. He loved it, but eventually the stories — often manufactured, non-local pieces inspired by press releases — left him cold. "There was something missing," he says. In mid-2007, while covering a zoning board of appeals meeting for the Bedford Record Review, he found that missing ingredient: the nitty-gritty realism of community journalism. "I was interacting with the panel, talking to people who had complaints. That process felt a lot purer, a lot more relevant. Not to get too corny about it, but I said, I want to be doing this again. Community journalism is so real. I wanted to move in that direction." Around the same time, Gannett closed the Patent Trader, which had covered the county for half a century. Stone saw this vacancy as an opportunity to be his own boss and take a stand against the growing digital dominance of newsgathering. "I didn't need to quit a job to do it. I was on my wife's healthcare. It seemed the stars were aligned for me to do this." He sat down with a legal pad in his basement and plotted out his first edition. It was August, and Stone wanted to get the paper out in September, to capitalize on the fall advertising season. He called Martin Wilbur to get his opinion. "I remember saying, 'Between the two of us we can find dozens of people to write,'" says Wilbur, who had one foot out the door at North County News. "But how are you going to sell ads and produce and print and distribute it?" Sometimes naïveté is a blessing. Taking $2,000 from savings, Stone hired a freelance designer to whip up a prototype. He called it the Examiner, which had "an old-school, throwback feel" to it, as did the logo's Olde English font. He got managerial and administrative advice from a neighbor. A printer he found churned out 500 copies of the prototype, and he began cold-calling businesses in Pleasantville and Mount Kisco, trying to drum up ads. One of his first advertisers was Chris Cornell, a framing business owner who is now director of social media for Thompson & Bender, the Briarcliff-based marketing and PR firm. "He didn't have to sell me very hard because I was very enthusiastic about a weekly publication covering the village," Cornell says. Still, "You look around and see other publishing entities folding up, and here's this guy starting something new. I felt a combination of hoping he would succeed and really doubting whether he would." It's safe to say that Stone has exceeded expectations. He rounded up enough advertisers and brought in the "enormously talented" Wilbur as his editor in chief as well as a few North County News "refugees," as they called themselves, to report and produce it. Stone printed 2,000 copies, split between the two villages, and delivered them out of his Honda Accord. The Examiner's combination of hard news, soft features, and school sports made it an instant hit. With no offices to rent, no investors to reimburse, and no postage to pay, Stone says the company was profitable right out of the gate. "Our low overhead made all the difference in the world," says Stone, who only goes into villages where he "sees an opportunity" — either an existing paper has gone out of business or there's an underserved market. And he goes out of his way to stay on good terms with other publishers. "Scarsdale and Bedford have terrific, established papers I wouldn't want to compete with because I respect them so much." White Plains, on the other hand, "was almost ridiculously wide open," (Continued on next page)

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