[I selected this article
for reposting on Rick On Theater
for one reason: the teens who are its subject have impressed me. This is my way of sending them a shout-out
(though I doubt any of them will see it . . . unless one of them Googles her-
or himself, or their publication).
[Go, you guys, go!]
“COVERING THE
HAMPTONS FROM A TEENAGE VIEW”
by Callie Holtermann
Print is dead? Don’t Tell These 15-Year-Olds.
A newspaper started last year by Montauk eighth graders offers a local take on their world, minus the celebrity sheen.
[Callie Holtermann’s article about The Ditch Weekly ran in the New York Times on 25 May 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section. It was published on 23 May 2025 as “They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper“ on the Times website and updated on 27 May 2025.
[For this article, Holtermann reported from Montauk and East Hampton, New York, both in Suffolk County, the easternmost county on Long Island. Montauk is a hamlet within the town of East Hampton, which occupies the easternmost tip of the peninsula known as the South Fork of Suffolk County.
[Montauk is 114 miles east of downtown Brooklyn in Kings County (i.e., New York City’s Borough of Brooklyn), the westernmost county on the island. East Hampton is 100 miles from Brooklyn. (Between Kings and Suffolk Counties on Long Island are Queens County, which is also the Borough of Queens, and Nassau County.) Montauk and East Hampton are 117 and 103 miles from Manhattan (New York County), across the East River to the north of Long Island.]
The Ditch Weekly, a Montauk newspaper, is staffed by middle and high schoolers.
On a Saturday morning in May, five hard-nosed reporters filed into an office on the South Fork of Long Island and picked up their red pens.
For two hours, they combed through the drafts in front of them. Clunky sentences were tightened. Inelegant adjectives were cut. Powdered doughnut holes were eaten, and mini bags of Cheez-Its, too.
This was the final proofreading session for an issue of The Ditch Weekly, a seasonal newspaper about Montauk that is written and edited by locals ages 13 to 17. Its staffers had gathered to put the finishing touches on their first paper of the year, which would be published over Memorial Day weekend [24-26 May 2025—the unofficial beginning of summer in the U.S.].
Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.
He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.
‘‘We still haven’t done hot dogs,’’ Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.
The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.
‘‘We were still very young; we had no idea what we were doing,’’ said Billy, a junior varsity quarterback whose hair was tousled into a cruciferous mop.
The trio got an early publicity bump with an article in The East Hampton Star [see below], a stalwart local paper whose owner and editor is Ellis’s father, David Rattray. Hyperlocal and proudly anachronistic, The Ditch Weekly in some ways resembled a more wholesome little brother of The Drunken Canal, Dimes Square’s onetime paper of record. Here was another unexpected print publication from members of a digital generation, just with more boogie boarding and fewer club drugs.
[The East Hampton Star is a weekly, independent, family-owned newspaper published each Thursday. Founded in 1885, it’s one of the few such papers still existing in the United States. The Drunken Canal was a New York City-based newspaper of a little over two dozen pages from 2020 to 2022 (i.e., the pandemic years) that focused on youth culture in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Dimes Square is a “microneighborhood” of New York City between Manhattan’s Chinatown and LES. The name is a play on “Times Square,” and refers to Dimes, a popular, health-conscious, Californian-style restaurant located at the intersection of Canal and Division Street on the LES.]
The Ditch team published 10 issues last summer before taking a break to start high school. But on FaceTime calls and in English class, where Billy sits one desk in front of Teddy, they have been plotting their return.
For The Ditch Weekly’s sophomore summer, its staff has swelled to 20 teenagers. Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales. And they do not want their parents to be involved – except for when they need their parents to drive them places.
Perhaps most ambitious of all, they hope to persuade other teenagers to put down their phones and pick up a newspaper.
‘‘When you’re on your phone, it gets boring after a while,’’ said Dylan Centalonza, 14, a new writer for the paper who covers motels with her twin sister, Fallon. ‘‘This is something you have to put work into.’’
Local News, Local Kids
The teenagers who work on The Ditch Weekly are almost all year-round residents of the South Fork of Long Island. They have summer jobs working at golf clubs and jewelry stores; their parents are real estate agents, financial advisers, farm stand owners and restaurateurs.
They are well aware of the area’s reputation as a part-time playground for the superrich, where Manhattanites sip cocktails poolside and browse the Gucci store. But they are frankly bored by the idea of covering that world and the celebrities who often populate it. ‘‘There’s so many that sometimes you just walk right past them,’’ said Lauren Boyle, 14, adding that practically everyone on staff had bumped into Scarlett Johansson.
They would rather assign stories about the version of Montauk and its surroundings that they know best. In interviews between copy-edits, they described quiet winters attending East Hampton High School and summers spent surfing and biking around Montauk Shores, the community of high-end trailer homes that overlooks Ditch Plains Beach.
[Ditch Plains Beach, widely considered one of the best surfing beaches in the area, is about two miles east of the village of Montauk.]
‘‘Everyone thinks of it as just a rich, touristy place, but there’s so much of the past that nobody really knows about,’’ said Ellis, 15, who wrote an article last year about the history of Montauk’s skate park. Working on the paper, he added, ‘‘I learned so much about the town I live in.’’
Early issues of The Ditch Weekly, which is named for the founders’ favorite sandy hangout, contained Teddy’s review of dueling pancake houses (headline: ‘‘Battle of the Buttermilk’’) and Billy’s interview with a surf shop owner. Ellis wrote a weekly roundup of mischief from police reports (headline: ‘‘Spring Shenanigans’’).
‘‘A Greenwich Village man is facing a felony charge for possession of cocaine after police spotted him in downtown Montauk,’’ he wrote in a dispatch last July, followed by an account of a spat between two intoxicated people over the ownership of a Rolex.
There are also more ambitious offerings. Lauren was especially proud of an article she had just written with Valentina Balducci, 15, about how Montauk business owners stay afloat in the winter offseason. Last year Teddy’s older sister, Nettie Rattray, 17, snagged an interview with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer [b. 1971; lawyer and politician; 49th Governor of Michigan since 2019 and her second and final term ends on 1 January 2027] of Michigan about Gen Z voter turnout that ran on the paper’s front page.
Their output is impressive enough to invite some questions.
‘‘I get asked a lot, ‘Are the kids actually doing it?’’’ said Dana Stern, Billy’s mother, over omelets at a diner in East Hampton. Her attempts to contribute are usually shut down, she said. ‘‘They made it very clear that they don’t want adults helping.’’
Billy does not want the paper to be perceived as a junior spinoff of The East Hampton Star, even if both publications have a Rattray on the masthead. Mr. Rattray, who surely has wisdom to pass down about running a newspaper, wrote in an email that he had intentionally stayed out of Ditch Weekly operations beyond helping Ellis learn how to decipher police reports.
Still, the office the teenagers work out of belongs to Dr. Stern, a dermatologist. A staff member on The Star’s production team, Matt Charron, taught Billy how to use page layout software last year. And Bess Rattray, Teddy’s mother, has offered occasional journalistic advice informed by her career writing and editing for The Star and Vogue. (One suggestion, directed at her son: Don’t accept free pancakes from a restaurant you plan to review.)
The parents are mostly just grateful that their children are doing something other than sitting inside and playing video games, Ms. Rattray said.
‘‘Last year we were kind of keeping them on schedule, through sheer parental panic,’’ she said. This year, she added, ‘‘the parental role is really going to be winnowed down to ‘driver.’’’
‘Print Is Dying’? Don’t Tell Them That.
It is not exactly an obvious moment to break into the newspaper business.
‘‘I hear a lot of, ‘Print is dying,’’’ Ellis said. He and Billy started discussing potential business ideas in the summer of 2023, like selling food on the beach or writing a newsletter. A conversation with Mr. Rattray about his line of work made them consider a paper.
Billy, who joined his high school newspaper as a freshman, called a printer to get an idea of production costs and looked up ad rates on The Star’s website. ‘‘The numbers worked out,’’ he said.
The founders’ parents said they were not covering the paper’s expenses, which are supported by advertisements that the teenagers sell to local restaurants, real estate agents and surf shops. (A few ads have been sold to relatives of staff members.)
Harry Karoussos, the paper’s 13-year-old head of sales, said that he and Billy usually walk into stores with a copy of the paper and a three-page media kit. A degree of transparency is required when he calls business owners to make them aware of advertising opportunities with The Ditch Weekly.
‘‘I have to, like, notify them that I’m a kid,’’ he said, estimating that he had made at least 40 sales calls this year.
Despite industrywide headwinds, The Ditch Weekly is ‘‘very profitable,’’ said Charlie Stern, the paper’s chief financial officer, who at 17 is something of an elder statesman on the staff.
He is also Billy’s older brother; the two have a standing meeting on Sundays to discuss ad revenue and expenses. Staff writers are paid $50 to $70 an article, and printing costs are around $900 per week. A portion of their profits are donated to A Walk on Water, an organization that facilitates surfing for children with disabilities.
The team declined to disclose their profits, but Ms. Rattray admitted that she had been ‘‘astounded’’ by the paper’s financial success. With his cut from last summer, Teddy bought an e-bike.
‘Mom, It’s Under Control’
Back at Ditch headquarters, where the doughnut holes were dwindling, veteran staff members sat with the paper’s first two writers from New York City, Annie Singh and Sofia Birchard. The group debated: Would a TikTok account help them reach more teenagers, or would it cheapen the appearance of their reporting?
‘‘It’s definitely easier to blow up’’ on TikTok than on Instagram, where they currently have an account, Valentina said.
[The Ditch doesn’t seem to have a website, but I gather that the Instagram account serves that purpose at present.]
‘‘And even if we don’t blow up, that’s fine,’’ Lauren responded. ‘‘As long as we have some social media that makes us look fun. We’re not, like, boring people, I don’t think.’’
Nearby, Hudson Tanzmann, 15, the paper’s head of distribution, said that he and Billy had been trying to set up a more sophisticated delivery program than the current system of leaving stacks of free papers at stores around Montauk, weighed down by painted rocks.
The enterprise has turned friends into colleagues, and summer vacation into a cascade of deadlines.
Billy is in charge of making sure everything gets done, hence the color-coded planning document. (‘‘Red is, We need it now,’’ he said.) At times Dr. Stern has worried about her son’s stress levels during what should be the most relaxing season of the year. ‘‘Billy’s always like, ‘Mom, it’s under control,’’’ she said.
But if the learning curve is occasionally painful, it is also kind of the point. Grace Dunchick, 15, said she had returned to The Ditch for a second summer because she liked trying something new alongside her friends and having a physical product to show for it.
This summer, she plans to photograph beachgoers and write about the trends she observes, in the tradition of the fashion photographer Bill Cunningham [1929-2016]. ‘‘I spend a lot of time on social media, so anything to break me away from that,’’ she said, adding: ‘‘It’s really bad. It’s like, actually an addiction.’’
She looked over at her friends, still gathered at the proofreading table, and editorial inspiration struck. ‘‘That would be a cool article.’’
[Callie Holtermann, who joined the New York Times in 2020, reports on style and pop culture for the Times.
[In two posts on ROT, “Books in Print” (14 July 2010) and “We Get Letters” (7 April 2015), I wrote about the disappearance of paper documents, both handwritten and printed.
[Over the years that I’ve done research projects for school, publication, my individual edification, or out-of-town clients, I used old newspapers and magazines—some of them really old, back into the early 20th century, the 19th century, and even the odd 18th century—digging through newspaper morgues and clipping files, peering at microfilms and microforms years before there were computer databases or Google.
[Many newspapers, especially small ones like the weeklies or semi-weeklies in towns like East Hampton and regional papers covering counties across the country, have closed down. Some big-city dailies have shut down their print edition and now publish only online, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has just announced that its final physical print edition is scheduled for 31 December, and in New Jersey, four dailies went all-digital earlier this year: the Newark Star-Ledger, the Times of Trenton, and the South Jersey Times covering Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties (last print editions: 2 February); and the Jersey Journal in Hudson County (1 February).
[As each paper goes digital and forsakes print, there will be fewer and fewer of them to preserve in any format. Newspaper websites, like all websites, are, despite the myth that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net, evanescent. Editors and publishers can decide after a while not to archive back issues, as the Jerusalem Post did in 2004 because the owner decided it was superfluous, making it hard to find old articles for reference. Without some kind of access to hard copies of back issues, even microfilms or PDF’s, research becomes impossible.
[Libraries keep old books and periodicals we can get to when we want them. Some old magazines are still paper copies, but they’ve mostly been transferred to microform and then digital computer files, but they had to start out as hard copies. When there are only electronic files to start with, who’s going to archive them? Will someone keep them updated so that as the storage and retrieval technology changes, as it inevitably does every few years, they can still be read?
[The East Hampton teens are working with paper and ink, however retro that seems. I hope someone in the Ditch group is keeping copies of their product for posterity (and that they’re giving a copy to their local library, who I hope is keeping them for future reference. You might be surprised at how often little papers like The Ditch Weekly have been helpful to some research project of mine.
[Has any of you ever heard of the Park Slope News? Or Fountain of Light? Or Park East? They’re all tiny papers from which I got useful material for one project or another. Then there’s Falcon Times and What’s What—a junior college student paper and one from a high school, both of which gave me information for which I was searching.
* *
* *
“TEENS LAUNCH A
NEWSPAPER FOR MONTAUK”
by Christine Sampson
[This is the East Hampton Star article mentioned above in the Times report. I thought it was worth adding to the post because it’s a local story, and was published on 23 May 2024, the day before The Ditch’s first issue came out.]
Three East Hampton Middle School students have embarked on a new project: a weekly newspaper called Ditch Weekly, chronicling all that’s happening in Montauk from a youth perspective.
In the first issue — 800 copies of which will drop today in shops and restaurants across the hamlet — readers will see restaurant reviews, interviews, photos, a hiking guide, and even a police blotter. The young publishers went out and sold advertisements — all the things a grown-up newspaper does. Look for nine more issues just like it spanning the rest of the summer.
The newspaper was the idea of Billy Stern, an eighth grader from Amagansett who comes from a community-oriented family. His older brother Charlie, who’s in high school, started an effective peer-tutoring program last year to help fellow students with math skills, and his twin brother, Wylie, volunteers for A Walk on Water [see above] and works for Corey’s Wave [surfing instruction].
“My parents are really hard workers,” Billy said in an interview. “They wanted us to do something, with our summers especially. They want me and my brothers to jump on opportunities when we’re young.”
Billy is joined on the Ditch Weekly masthead by two friends who were already pretty familiar with the news business: Ellis Rattray, whose father, David Rattray, is the editor of The [East Hampton] Star, and his cousin Teddy Rattray, whose mother, Bess Rattray, is the co-editor of The Star’s East magazine.
Ellis said his participation was inspired, in part, by his family’s involvement in the newspaper business. “This is my first time working with people on an actual job,” he said. “I feel like I’m becoming a better writer and getting used to newspaper style. I’d only written papers for school before.”
Teddy commented that “being a part of this newspaper really gives you the ins and outs of journalism. You learn how difficult it is.”
Along the way, the boys got some technology lessons from Matt Charron, who works on The Star’s production team handling photos and page layout. “They’re impressive,” Mr. Charron said. “They’re super motivated. Billy, especially, is so passionate about doing this.”
The boys agreed that deadlines — time management, in general — was the biggest challenge, but that working together has been a lot of fun.
Dr. Dana Stern, Billy’s mom, is proud of them and excited about the debut of Ditch Weekly. “It’s definitely been a huge undertaking, more so than anybody realized,” she said. “It encompasses so many different areas — running a business, writing, editing, and even just the experience of talking to adults and corresponding with adults.”
“There’s been a lot of ‘school-comes-first’ reminders,” Dr. Stern said, “but it’s been incredible.”
Billy said putting the first issue together was “grueling.”
“We thought an old-school newspaper would be a really cool idea,” he said. “We wanted to create something that would help us explore our passions, and I think it really has. I can’t wait to see it. It’s going to be great.”
[Christine Sampson, Deputy Managing Editor of The East Hampton Star, began contributing to the Star in March of 2015. Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital publications, including the New York Times, Patch.com, the Huffington Post, and Newsday.
[I love newspapers. I always have. Not just what they publish or the people who make them, but the paper document itself. Each paper has its own style, its own look, from the nameplate on the front page, to the typeface, to the layout and writing style. Big-city journals, small-town papers, neighborhood papers; dailies, weeklies, semi-weeklies; tabloids and broadsheets—they were all fun to encounter in their own ways.
[When I was a teenager and lived in Germany (my dad was a Foreign Service Officer; see “An American Teen in Germany“ [9 and 12 March 2013]), I kept a list in my head of the different airlines on which I flew and the airports where I landed or took off. Later, I sort of did the same thing with newspapers I came across in my research.
[I think the first “exotic” newspaper I saw was one my father brought back from a business trip. It was November 1960, and Dad went to Alaska to scope out potential investment opportunities for a group he and some associates had started just before the territory was admitted to the Union (3 January 1959). Mom went along with him and they were in Fairbanks on 8 November—the day John F. Kennedy (1917-63) was elected the 35th President of the United States.
[Dad brought back the whole issue of the next day’s Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the daily newspaper published the farthest north in the U.S., with the banner headline announcing the result of the first presidential election in which the new state had participated.
[I was in eighth grade and about to turn 14, and I’d been very focused on this election, the first one of which I was truly aware. (Frequent ROTters will know that two of my schoolmates at that time were Julie and Trisha Nixon, the daughters of Vice President Richard Nixon [1913-94] who was the Republican candidate for president.) I kept that newspaper, wrapped in a plastic sheet, for years, until it literally disintegrated from age and handling.
[Of course, none of this has anything to do with the content of any given article, which is the point of the research, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s amazing how many variations there are on what’s basically the same basic design.
[Sometimes, however, it is significant to see the original print edition, even a PDF instead of an HTML file. The optical readers that digitize the original printed text can misread what they scan and you can get gobbledygook in the HTML version. The HTML also often doesn’t preserve italics where the original print used it and you’d never know if you didn’t check the PDF or microfilm.
[But mostly, it was just fun—like playing the License Plate Game.]
