How to Run a Small-Town Paper When Your Town Is East Hampton

lively police blotterer. But Rattree has a unique challenge because the Star is the East Hampton Star, and it has to cover the very different town that forms for three months a year when it's coverage area triples in population and becomes the center of an elite New York social universe. It's an editorial conundrum not faced by Ratrey's grandfather father. My family was in a position in the nineteen thirties to buy the East Hampton Star. Um it was not

terribly expensive. It was the Depression. But nonetheless we and other quote unquote leading families of East Hampton. Oh, by the way, I'm thirteenth generation to serve set the context, you know, in looking at the history of the paper. The first thing I thought was, what do all of this line of rat Trays have in common? Your grandfather, your father, and mother and now you what what? What?

What does that line have in common? What all five of us, across three generations have is this very very strong attachment to place, a sense of place and a sense of wanting to preserved, defend and understand it. Which is interesting because my mother was a nice Jewish girl from Bayon, New Jersey. My grandfather was a Scottish immigrant by way of San Francisco. But we all had that sense that we loved East Hampton, loved the South Fork,

and wanted to keep it that way. When I first came out here as a renter eighty two, your mother was in charge, I think, and then you had sold an equity stake in the company too, in the in the paper to somebody else. That's right. It became a little bit of a power struggle. Um. This is um. About year two thousand, I came back to take over the paper and my mother said she was tired and would I do it? And she'd throw in a house.

Basically she threw it. Yeah, And my girlfriend and I at the time wanted to get out of New York City. We wanted to have a dog, and we didn't want to subject a dog to New York and so everything lined up. So Arthur Carter was the partner, and he was fairly back seat partner for the Star for many years. But the moment when I came back and I sought to assume the editorship was when he could exert a little bit of pressure. Um. You know, it's a very

strange agreement. And he and my mother were at fifty fifty and I mean that's a recipe in a small business for write nothing with war and uh, you know. So then there's his lawyers involved, and eventually things are settled and we are now owners of the Star um with the help of local banks. When when you see you were in the city, You grew up out here, you went to Dartmouth, you were a study, you were going to be a museum designer. One could argue you're

still a museum designer in the newspaper business. But how long were you in the city. I was there for most of the nineties, moved out here in Did you really not want to live in New York and woden It didn't I really did hit the wall. I mean I realized I was spending all of my week thinking about getting out here and looking out of my window, you know, sort of pining for this. Yeah, it really was. Yeah, what do you remember most about your childhood out here?

There certainly was a sense of freedom there. There really weren't houses much in the woods, so the woods were these open places where you know, we would entertain ourselves during breaks and high schoo cool by, you know, taking my nine seventy dodge dart on the horse trails and

you know, Cage three children. That was before, of course, the tick epidemic, when you actually could go outside, So there was a sense of you know, you could sort of go anywhere that the Maidstone Club, which is famously sort of exclusive, didn't really care that we would fish off the golf dock and that sort of thing. You try that now and they probably have you taste if

you're lucky. So childhood here was I think we're bored out of our minds, but at least we had some open space in which to express that boardom in mostly constructive ways. Do you think you've got a good education at Eastema High School back then? Yeah? I think I did. I wasn't prepared for college level volume of work. But you know, it was a good high school then, it's a good high school now. It was non diverse. I think we had one Latino family, the Sonabrias. Right now,

it's about Latino. I loved it, and I loved knowing the kids from Montauk. It seems like half my graduating class ended up being East Hampton Town cops. You know, it's it's kind of a you know, despite all of the glitz of the Hampton's and all of that, there is a small town quality that's kind of endearing. I mean, the village chief of police recently really retired. He and I had a fist fight in seventh grade and I I clocked him in the head and then what I

all I remember is his head was really hard. Comes in and ye lane of work now and your car has been getting ticketed ever since? Right, yeah? Yeah? Now, the the this area also, I mean, I'll get off this invention, but this community. I mean, for you and your staff, you must get like whiplash come Labor Day weekend in the distinction between what you're doing in those three months and the rest of the describe what that's like, what you're reporting on for one season, and then what's

it like the rest of the year for you. What's really interesting. One of the weirdest things about the difference between the season is you almost can't even put your finger on what it is that changes that. Why the why the level goes from zero to ten overnight. And it's certainly the volume of people, um, you know, the the volume of police news and the creativity of the perpetrators and that sort of thing. Um everything it's more dangerous every think it's more dangerous here. But there's also

this quality of um friction. I think that local people get more heated up in July metaphorically than they do in February about whatever the neighborhood conflict is, the thing that's bothering them, um, and so so that sense of um calamity increases, so that even that's that's it's the same people between February and July. The anxiety and the feeling like this really really matters and that the community is going to hell in a handbasket is very palpable.

In the summer, everything is turned up. My description of it is that people come out here to have a particular experience, and if they don't have that experience when

they're here, they get really angry. They get a house, whether they have a really really fancy house on Lily Pond Lane and it's private, or they get a share with a bunch of friends, and they're gonna find romance and they're gonna drink this the perfect cocktail and have the perfect steak, and they're gonna be out of that pool at four in the morning and pass out and sleep till noon and wake up and have bagels at Goldberg or whatever. There's like a whole thing they have

lined up. And if it doesn't happen in those two weeks or however many weeks they have their share out here, they're very piste off. I think it's right. There's a frantic quality to it. You know. One of the things, it's so funny. It manifests itself a lot with driving, of course, I'm sure you know. You know, there's the off season driving, and there's on season driving, and you there's that level of driving can actually be relaxing in in October um and and you can get a sandwich

without a mont Talk you haven't forbid. Southampton can forget. Well, it's a big deal, you know, like my friends in sag Harbor, I don't see I live in m Aganst. Um, you know, I don't see him until October, and you know, and I'm willing to drive to sag Harbor. The sag Harbor people won't drive to Emaganst. There's a whole thing. But but this also feels like time expands and contracts, like I can't I used to do this. I used to come out for the weekend and and pack it

all into two days. And now I can't even conceive of doing that. It seems impossible to operate at that speed. But I think you're absolutely right. There's a quality of perfection that didn't exist when I was a kid and even a young person here. That the quality of having the perfect weekend, the perfect margarite, of the perfect lobster bake or something like that. Um. So if there's a shift too, I think there's one of tone and expectation

among people here. I mean I worked for as a caterer for a while, and you know we're pretty loosey goosey, you know, lobsters and things like that. And you know I would show up in jeans or whatever. That just wouldn't cut it today. You have to sort of look a certain way and tell you what to though in a weird way, alex is cheaper to get a piece of the Hampton's now than it used to be so, right because used to rent for a whole season and

that would be thirty dollars or whatever it was. Well, now with Airbnb and and home sharing like that, basically anybody with credit card and a few hundred bucks can scratch together a tiny little piece of the East Hampton experience. So there's this whole other set and one of the things they do or is kind of pack it in.

So if you're an airbnber and you're here for three nights with your family and your uncle and your aunt, you're gonna play tennis, swim, go to lunch for lunch, and you're gonna rip out to Montalk to see the book. So there's this this um increased amplitude I think of activity. So you know, so there's could hate to say, maybe a little bit more of a democratic or egalitarian quality

to summer in East Hampton. When you asked by your mother to come, was there a period of a year or two of you sat there and said, what have I got myself into? You know, it's interesting my When I first got back at the newspaper, I started doing sort of menial stuff, and then I was assigned to cover the local zoning board. And you know, I remember distinctly making a mistake which is not terribly important now,

but it was about a ferry. There had been a giant fight in Montauk whether or not there'd be a passenger ferry to block island was at the high speed ferry. Yeah, And so there was this critical juncture of how many cars were going to be parked in the ferry parking lot, which had with the whole thing was based on how many cars is, how many people and so on. And I had no idea that this had been a tenure

fight over this parking lot. And I wrote a little story about it, and I got it acent wrong because it was the final chapter, the anima of of this epic struggle over the future of Montauk. And and that was a moment of like, Yeah, what the hell is going on here, this minutition that I don't understand. I've been away for ten years, just coming out as a weekend er um but that's kind of the whole community

journalism thing. It's the coverage of the the incremental steps, and you know, eventually I began to amass enough familiarity with what was going on to make sense of things that might to the outside seem insignificant number of cars in the parking lot, which actually was the you know, the finish Yeah, and when when when you took the job, was there a bit of a chasm between what you thought the job was and what you eventually found out

it was? Yeah, there really was. I don't think I appreciated how much the newspaper matter to the community and how mad people would get if their item didn't get in. That's a big deal, And I think that was a lesson to to realize. Give an example, there's a you know, a guy had collected some sort of dolls from there's this life work collecting these dolls, and he was going to have like a one day show at the library.

This goes back to years, and we didn't get it in the paper, and the guy came in and he was outraged, And that was a lesson to me. Like, this guy he spent twenty years collecting these dolls and this is his moment. He's going to talk about the dolls at the library. He wanted you to care. Yeah. Yeah,

it was a big deal. And and that was a lesson that I don't think he was working in documentaries and museums and all this stuff in New York, sort of bouncing from one subject to another, and I don't think I understood the the closeness and humanity of people's interests and how that's reflected in local media. That was

a big lesson. Over the arc of the last twenty plus years that you've been doing the job, there were in the situation where in now with the American political landscape, and part of that has been this evolution of news and media. What are the tropes, what are the rules of journalism that have affected that field over the last twenties that affect you as well. UM, I think audiences are so fractured into various silos that are not necessarily

going to cross over. Any sized media organization has to figure out how to bring the brand to the consumers where they live, whether it's digitally or on print. Um. You know, we had this unbelievable monopoly newspapers for two or three hundred years I mean the United States, I don't know, middle of the eighteenth century starts publishing newspapers. We had no competition. Television and radio didn't really do

what print could do. We don't anymore at the scale of these temp and starts, and so we find ourselves competing with all of these different channels, basically competing for people's time, competing for their news consumption, and trying to figure out, you know, how to reach them in what

they need. And and that's an interesting puzzle. And that's i'd say about the last decade or so that's really come to the four where where we realized we're not the only game in town anymore, that we have to compete. It's more didn't even compete. It's like we we could sort of do whatever we wanted. When when at a certain point now we have to understand the canoes consumer more and really hand deliver walk it to them what

what we our best guess is that they need? And are you you're up in the morning and what is it for you? Watch? Listen, read what New York Times online, Washington Post online. You know, we have home delivery at the Times, so it doesn't show up till I leave for work, so that so I am reading digitally. Twitter is important, I think, you know, you get a feel for what's what's going on at the Atlantic or somewhere

like that. And then you know that there's a lot of sort of academics who post things, which is which is interesting because it's get back to this this question of a fractured me do you need you know, even editors need editors and curators now to figure out and help who is yours? Maggie Harman at the Times, anything

she recommends I'm going to read. Uh. There's a wonderful historian of contemporary fitness culture, you know, writing about aerobics and things like that, Natalie Petrozzella, and she's a as the storian. I think she's at City College or somewhere, and she will post a link to some wonderful piece

about contemporary life and history. And you know, that's one of the wonderful things about the age we're living in is is we are we certainly have the ability to come into contact with so much more than we used to. And yeah, and you know, I mean, who thought I'd be interested in someone who wrote about aerobics culture and the rise of you know, fitness culture in the eighties. That's kind of interesting, not that I ever did it, min't you. No TV news, No TV on a on

a screen on mute. In the offices of the East Hampton Stone. No, we have a television. It's never on. Not kidding. In fact, I think it's one of those old fashioned ones, the glass you know, CRT tubes, the tube however that works. Yeah. Um, we get the Post in the daily News and newsday hard copy in the office and it's always a pleasure. And we have a Jack Graves who is our sports writer who's been with us since nineteen. Part of his daily rituals to sit

in the front office and read the Post. It's you know, you can find out a good sports page the Post. It does. I feel that as far as I'm going to go a sports page that you know headlines. Now, do you get a lot of pressure from people politically or you must get some Well, it's wonderful. I mean, I think the Democrats think that I'm some sort of lout and the Republicans think I'm some sort of Democratic stooge. It's a cliche in the business if both sides are

piste off at you you're doing something right. Um, But it's interesting what you talk about like outright political hostility or blocking it thing. You know, you run into these folks in the supermarket here. You know, I know the chairman of both political parties fairly will and you know, it's it's interesting. I've always found like the the side that doesn't agree with you, at least locally is generally the more polite, um and and and frankly easier to

talk to. Um. You know, we're a paper with with definite liberal leanings, but not um crazy people might say, I'm completely crazy. Editor of the East Hampton Star, David rat Trey. Janice Men got her start as a beat reporter at a different small town newspaper. She ended up running US Weekly and changing celebrity reporting forever. You know. The first year that I started US Weekly, I think that was the first year American Idol came on air, and so it was his whole explosion of reality TV.

So this intimacy that you know, that's when people started to call celebrities on their first name basis, like Brittany at Jessica, you know, and the whole thing was like some like giant cotton candy machine. The rest of my conversation with Janice min is in our archive at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. David Rattray is the editor and with his mother, the owner of the East Hampton Star.

Most debates playing out on his pages revolve around who can build what and where it might take a very very strong anti development stance. Basically, I think we just need to stop and we're pa I agree with you speak about that. Describe what you think happened development was because he go other places like the Vineyard and the Cape, and you go to Nantucket and it's completed. It's the speculative real estate is not going to change that. They

won't allow that. What happened out here in your lifetime, Well, there's been successive waves that I think each time the wave hits, we think, well, it just couldn't get any worse, It couldn't get more more developed. Um, there was a big push in the eighties people coming out here and beginning to settle in the woods, driven by people who

wanted to be here. The speculative money began to roll in sort of in the next wave so there's a nineties boom, and then there's a two thousand boom which got really intense, and and you know, you begin to see a lot of um anonymous partnerships coming in. I mean, for example, Paul Manafort was spending Ukrainian blood money to

build himself a palace and watermel Um. There was an internationalization of the money flowing into real estate here that I think has really caused a break architecturally and socially between what came before and kind of where we are now.

And I know that sounds dark and dire. Um, but if you could, if you can kind of like two groups as the people who wanted to be here because they loved it, people like you, and and then there are people for whom it represented something else or wasn't it was just part of an investment portfolio or place to you know, burn ill gotten gains and launder cash into American dollars. So so there is a quality I think now of unfamiliarity. Um, what are you suggesting might

be done? I really think there should be a no net growth strategy, so that if the town okay's an expansion of our restaurant, for example, that's offset in some other way. There's there's a great deal of public money or now for property acquisitions, so it's not an impossible idea to to think that you could do that. Why do you think the why do you why do you think the appropriation of that money has been so slow? These boards these last few they're not spending arely any

of that CPF money? Why? That's a good question. I think there's certainly been a little bit of pushback, and there's a strange myth that um taking land off the out of the market, if you will, If an acre is taken out of the market and m against it, suddenly that means we're not going to have affordable housing, name against it, which is of course insane because an acre and arm against it would set you back, you know,

a million dollars or something like that. Um. So there is this sort of political local rumbling that land preservation is good, but you don't want to go too far. It's causing many problems as ald you think about it. I mean, you know, other than real estate, probably the other big industries really the sort of landscape industrial complex, which is building, building and renovating, rendom aiding and planting,

you know, arbor vite, so you don't see your neighbors. Um. So it does kind of make sense that that a zero growth there's a threat, is a real threat. But you know, there's been an extraordinary effort at land preservation here. Um. The east end of Long Island is surrounded by fertile marine environments have been protected. Um, so you can still

get away from Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that's still indoors and that's a testament to really there's there was really a period when I was growing up here when there's folks with a lot of foresight decided we are going to save the woodlands, We're gonna save the bays, We're going to stop the mega development, um. You know. And I mean there's still plenty of pressure. Mont Talking particulars is coming under just extraordinary um, both sort of

corporate and ego driven development. But they're still wonderful places. So you can get away, um back roads that are essentially back roads. Still. I don't think it should be allowed to get much more crowded here um. And it could there's plenty of redevelopment that could happen. There's still vacant land down zoning. Sure they were like, Wow, you know,

we'll just put the town water in. Then we can down zone from five acres to two acres and build a hell of a lot more houses out here and don't have to worry about septic I think there was a moment where that probably was true, that there was a sense that we can run utilities and and get greater development from suburbanized. There are still a lot of very small lots here. I think that the question of suburbanization is interesting because the property values are so high.

It's really a question of who is building now and for what reason? And it's it seems like a lot of what goes on here is being built for churn and for turnover, and so a density is not quite as attractive as it might have been once because you want to have houses that look a certain way, so they've got that curb appeal for for resale. It's hard to know how much of the real estate industry here really is speculative still, but I think it's you know,

sake of argument. You know, does public water fit into that? I think so it is interesting you go to a place like Bellinus in Marin County, and the way that Bellinis has put the clamps on development is by limiting the number of water hookups, which you know both makes them very valuable. But but it's interesting, yes, suppose well, I mean we've hit saturation. I don't know if you try to use your cell phone today, but you know,

essentially you can't make a cell phone call. And when more areas than I'm used to write, you know, and then the internet's overloaded. I can only not make a phone call when I drove past Pearlman's property, right, yeah, now I can make a phone call many places. Well, that's right, that's right. Of course, there was rumors that someone on Newtown Lane in East Hampton had a cell phone jammer, but that was never Army lying on new

for the facts, just the facts. Now in the time we have left like a two more questions if you want to tell me about the Slaveholder project. You've been working on the origins of that and where is it at now? So this is really interesting. About two years ago we started, really I started asking the question, um, you know, what what was slave holding like in East Hampton?

I knew about two enslaved persons out of all of East Hampton history that you know, we're here, and what was surprising was the church records essentially listed something on the order of three hundred, three hundred thirty people who may well have been enslaved. So from that starting point, we've been trying to use census records and primary source documents of all sorts to make a list of every single enslaved person who ever lived in the town of East Hampton, and at this point where up to over

two fifty people. But what's interesting about that is what's emerging is a much more complicated picture of the American origin, frankly um because the argument has always been that sort of America came out of the colonies, that these townships became colonies, became sort of unified colonies, became states. You have the Revolution, Declaration of Independence, Constitution United States. So the concept, really, the way we've learned history is that

these white settlers built America. But the truth is that enslaved Africans worked side by side, and that the records are really everywhere where. For example, well, the East Hampton Library, for example, has a wonderful collection, as do many communities

of old Ledger books. So one of our greatest sources is uh several generations of shoemaker's account books and they would write something in there, like Cato, who belonged to Mr Malford, got a pair of shoes on such and such a date, and they would identify him as a negro um. They were scrupulous about keeping records. There wasn't really a lot of cash in those days, so it was an economy based on exchange. It wasn't barter per se.

I gave you a pair of shoes, and so you gonna work for me for half a day or something like that. So, but that's all written down, and so these records begin to get a picture that really anybody of means in the colonial period here, and we're talking from sixteen fifty onward, had at least one or two enslaved persons in their homes. What about you, may do I want to engage in this in part it's picking up something in the zeitgeist m violence against black men.

And early on in the project, I was talking to a historian in Cambridge, mass and he got choked up and he said that he could draw a direct line from the omission of enslaved Africans from America's sense of self to violence against black men today. You know, if you think the Pilgrims made America, the Africans sort of don't fit into that myth. And you know, maybe it's easier to shoot him in the back because I think

most Americans still think of slavery's a southern institution. They think or maybe they think of roots, or they think of cotton. Maybe if they know a little more, they think about say Rice and the Carolinas. But the fact is that the coastal New England economy was based on slavery, not just in the labor here. But what we're beginning to understand is places like Shelter Island and East Hampton and Gardners Island were deeply involved in provisioning uh Caribbean

slave plantations where they grew sugar. Sugar was the big Atlantic, uh you know, economic driver of the time, and East Hampton was playing a big role in that. I'll give you one example, not to labor the point seventeen fifteen that the East Hampton town fathers get together in commission at church. It turns out to be the largest and most expensive church on Long Island. You sort of pause for a second. He well it a minute, what why

do these hard scrabble farmer, fishermen. But we've been told settled eastern Long Island, what are they doing building this? You know, Presbyterian p right, So what's the point, where's this money coming from it? And then you have to ask, so what they're doing essentially, um, what are hypothesis is is provisioning places like Barbados and Antigua and Haiti where all land was really given over to sugar production. It

was not a good place to grow cattle. Given another example in I think it's sixteen eighties six their thirty two hundred head of cattle in Montauk Montalk was just a giant cattle ranch. But there's only about two hundred, you know, people living in East Hampton. What a two hundred people need thirty two hundred heads of cattle? Right? You know, Boston's got its own cattle. New York's got

its own cattle, Hertford's got its own cattle. So so you know, it is likely we haven't found all of the records yet to really support the hypothesis, but it's very likely that the agricultural production and other household industries here were part of provisioning this vast slave driven economy in the Caribbean, and that's causing us on the project to really begin to rethink what East Hampton and coastal

New England is all about. And we think by by trying to expand this inventory of slavery among other communities on Long Island and into southern New England, we may be able to move in the American origin myth. I figured what the heck we aim high, So that's really what we're trying to do. And we use students, which is actually interesting, use a lot of high school students

to to do the research. They've sharp eyes and good memories and they will read, you know, if if you pitch it to them right, they will read an eighteenth century shoemaker's log book and find it fascinating. What do you think about the subject of reparations as it's being

discussed now? Coats and people like that. Boy, I'll tell you something, Um, I never really thought much about slave owning in my own family, and one day I was it sort of dawned on me that I ought to trace a couple of my lines and see, and I traced my great grandmother's family. The hunting's back to Reverend Nathaniel hunting, and he had several enslaved people in his house. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized, Oh crap, I'm part of this story. To the South

had its sort of day of reckoning for slavery. It lost the Civil War. They burned Atlanta, you know, so the South kind of paid the North never did. North never really owned up, owned up, and never it was never taken away. So to some tiny extent, the social position or wealth or relative comfort that my family enjoys here today is derived from the labor of enslaved people here at the end of the hell. Yeah, and here's

the other thing about reparations. Reparations, in my mind, are at least as much for the giver as the receiver. In fact, it's probably more important to have the conversation about reparations so that we as a country understand our origins. Whatever amount of money is almost irrelevant. But the point

is is that it's really the conversation about reparations. It forces communities like he's tamped Innerstone in Connecticut or Boston to to acknowledge and understand its slave owning past, and particularly from the Northeast to recognize that the wealth that it continues to enjoy today is based in some part on enslave labor. My father was someone who watched his own father's casual kind of racism. You know, Jesus Christ, these colored fellows sitting out there drinking all day on

that sofa. Jesus Christ. That disrubs me the wrong way. And my father would later say to me that my grandfather would then go in his apartment and sit on a sofa and drink beer all day and smoke cigarettes and watch their basis. And he said, the only difference between my father and those guys was a rent controlled lisa in an apartment. Otherwise they were exactly the same. I'm someone who reads the news now as I'm older. I'm sixty one years old, and I'll listen to like

the BBC News Hour. The announcement will come on and say, you know, the the body stacked eight high on the road d M. And and I think to myself, what the hell can I do about this right now? Like? What can I do? And therefore the journalistic experience that I like, in terms of not only seeking truth but understanding my place in a community, that I can have some effect on is always Thursdays reading the East Hampton Star. I sit with my East Tempting Star on Thursday afternoon.

I make everybody go away, and I read the Police Blotterer and the obituary page, and I read the obituaries word for word, and I go through the whole thing, the little village columns and Isabelle Carmichael and all this and the restaurant reviews, and I read the whole thing, and what are land sales? One third of an acre off of Springs fireplace? Where I see what are they getting for a third of an acre up in Springs

these days? And I need to know these things, and I need to read that as much as I need to read the Post or the Wall Street Journal. I think it's universal. I think people want to know about the communities they live in. Pingo, Pingo. Thank you for coming. It's a pleasure. David Ratre of the East Hampton Star, which he publishes on a strip of coastline his family has fished and farmed and preached to for almost four hundred years. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to

here's the thing, And I think, o tolp me. I mean from Thest me I