Do you remember your first summer job?

It probably wasn't as cool as this one

Nothing signals the start of summer quite like pulling up to your local sandwich shop or ice cream counter and wondering if the cashier is in high school or college. I didn’t have the best track record when it came to summer jobs. While my brother, who studied half as much for twice the results, made the wise move of training as a lifeguard and setting himself up for a recurring gig, I bounced around a bit more, with stints in the locker room at a golf club and on the retail floor of a clothing store at our local mall.¹

At that age I was so fixated on finding someone else willing to pay me minimum wage that I never stopped to think about what I would do if I went into business for myself or even that I could. Sure, I could have cut lawns or walked dogs under my own name, but even at that scale the startup and marketing effort was a lot harder than clocking in and ringing up.

That’s why I was so impressed to hear about what the teenage founders of The Ditch Weekly in Montauk are working on. Tired of their typical summer jobs, three friends got together last summer to put together an eight-page newspaper about their hometown. They write about summer camps in the area, review restaurants, and make sure to get the scoop when a celebrity opens a new store in town.

Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York Times

If you had told me that I could spend my summer talking to neighbors and writing about what was going on around town, I wouldn’t have believed you, but that’s exactly what these kids are doing. The best part? They aren’t just padding their résumés — they’re actually covering costs for printing, labor, and more through ad sales. “Despite industrywide headwinds, The Ditch Weekly is very profitable,” Charlie Stern, the paper’s chief financial officer, told The New York Times.

At a time when media companies are moving away from print altogether, The Ditch Weekly barely has a website, choosing instead to distribute through local brick and mortar shops in Montauk. It’s local news from local kids that you’ll only find locally.

I reached out to Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old editor, to ask what advice he would give to other students thinking outside the box for summer jobs and he said this:

“Even if it doesn’t work out you will have an experience that will help you figure out what you actually do want to do with your life. If you never try anything when you’re young you’ll be stuck doing something you don’t want to do when you’re older. Get out there and start a project. It doesn’t have to take much funding — just do it.”

If I was looking for a job this summer, I would heed his advice. I’d create the opportunity I was looking for, I’d make a business plan, I’d knock on doors, and if nothing else, I’d have a great story to tell when class resumed in the fall.

1. If anyone from the PacSun Theft Prevention Team at the Treasure Coast Square Mall is reading this, I do regret letting that woman into a changing room with multiple bags that seemed a lot fuller when she came out, but in my defense, she was really pretty.