Because I’ve been associated with The East Hampton Star for more than half a century, it is no surprise that friends at Peconic Landing, the retirement community across the water at Greenport to which my husband and I have moved, ask whether The Star is thriving, and want to talk about how a community newspaper deals with the digital economy.
I love to brag.
The Star was founded in the late 19th century — before the Long Island Rail Road reached town — and remains one of the last family-owned newspapers in the country. While small weeklies everywhere have collapsed or been purchased by conglomerates, we carry on independently. Indeed, the East End is lucky to have a cluster of newspapers still run locally (even if one of them, the venerable and impressive Sag Harbor Express, has now been folded into The Press News Group).
The standard rules of ethical journalism insisted on by my late husband, Ev Rattray, have steered us through thick and thin. The two big ethical guidelines, for us, are really extremely basic: News remains separate from advertising, and we don’t trade coverage for advertisements, as some local publications do.
While our editorial views in recent decades have leaned toward the liberal, we do not follow any party line, and — despite what many readers (or non-readers) presume — we strive mightily to remain neutral in our news coverage. Who you are, who you are related to, whether you are rich or poor, whether you are a Bonacker or from away . . . these distinctions do not enter into decisions about whether we determine a news story to be worthy of print.
But while we consider these policies and principles essential to the maintenance of a free press, they have not kept us from being a moveable target: Everyone in town, at some point, has an opportunity to be furious at their local newspaper. Being the subject of citizens’ and politicians’ ire comes with the territory. Maybe we investigated a figure in civil service who was popular in town. Or maybe someone’s uncle ended up in the police news, and the family considers that a slap in the face. Or maybe we printed details of a dispute over the location of a new tennis court in relation to an ocean dune, and the property owner considers it a private matter.
These sorts of beefs can get pretty personal in a still-small town like ours. We’ve had to be prepared for angry phone calls in the middle of the night, and once someone even threw a brick through one of our big plate-glass windows on Main Street.
But we soldier on, because we believe that America cannot have open government — or transparency in the court system as well as our local systems of zoning, taxation, and so on — without independent news coverage, and independent news coverage cannot be swayed by who you know.