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.
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, 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 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.
“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 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.
“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. “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 reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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