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Style|They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/style/ditch-weekly-montauk-newspaper-hamptons.html
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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.
