Tom Allon is a life-long New Yorker, a parent, an educator, and a publisher of a group of New York City-based community newspapers. Tom Allon began his career in the New York City public school system, teaching journalism and English at his alma mater, Stuyvesant High School. He went on to become an editor at the award-winning West Side Spirit and moved to the publishing side when he became Publisher of Manhattan’s two largest community weeklies, Our Town and West Side Spirit.

Tom has been a leader in local neighborhood-based journalism and the New York City publishing industry for the past 25 years. He is currently the CEO and owner of City and State NY, the most influential political media company in New York State.

Before privatizing Manhattan Media in August 2001, Tom was the executive vice president of News Communications, Inc., a public media company that owned 23 newspapers in New York City’s boroughs, Long Island and Washington, D.C. He was involved with the start-up of the successful Capitol Hill daily, The Hill, and helped supervise News Communications’ expansion throughout NYC’s neighborhoods in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Tom helped create two successful public high schools, Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the Upper East Side and Frank McCourt High School on the Upper West Side. He also served on the advisory boards of the West Side Crime Prevention Program and the Broadway Mall Association and was the President of the New York Press Association in 2008.

A 1980 Stuyvesant graduate, Tom received his BA in History from Cornell University in 1984 and his MS in Journalism from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1985. He now lives on the Upper West Side with his three teenage children.