Siegel Says He Wrote Rival Paper Alone
Record claimed Vol. XLIII with no editor, no address; Goodspeed has offered to fund it.
Siegel says a second edition is laid out, volume unchanged by hand.
By Anita Bath·Staff Reporter
Hunter Siegel at a Post Road copy shop Tuesday at 6:14 a.m. He printed twenty-two copies and delivered fourteen before 7 a.m.
“Look, the algorithm decided how my season goes months ago. This is the one thing that's gone my way.”
ROWAYTON, Conn., Sept. 30 —Hunter Siegel said Tuesday that he alone wrote, printed and distributed every copy of The Rowayton Record, the unsigned sheet that surfaced this week claiming a forty-third volume the club has never seen an issue of, and that he did it because the Screen was too slow to get its own reporting into print. Siegel said the one-man operation has already drawn outside interest, most immediately from Good Speed Media Ventures, a firm founded by Philip "Flip" Goodspeed, which has offered to make it a real newspaper.
The Record's front page carried the Vol. XLIII masthead though no Vol. I, II, or any of the intervening forty-two has ever circulated at the club. It listed no editor, gave no address for correspondence or complaint, and dated itself Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2026 — a Wednesday. Siegel, reached by telephone, said the date was not a printing error but a decision. "That's the day I decided it should have come out," he said.
Siegel said the Record's single article was a preseason personnel item he had already confirmed through his own sourcing, and that he grew tired of waiting for the Screen to publish it. "I had the story. The Screen had the story," he said. "The difference is I put mine in people's mailboxes."
By his own account, Siegel printed the run at a Post Road copy shop at 6:14 a.m. Tuesday, folded each copy by hand, and delivered fourteen of them to mailboxes along Rowayton Avenue and Pine Point Road before 7 a.m. He said a total of twenty-two copies exist and that none have been recalled.
Asked whether founding a newspaper might be pulling focus from his own game this preseason, Siegel said his rating had already written him off for the year regardless. "Look, the algorithm decided how my season goes months ago," he said. "This is the one thing that's gone my way."
Goodspeed, who runs a Darien-based investment shop under the Good Speed Media Ventures name, confirmed he has extended a term sheet to Siegel calling for a $40,000 seed investment, a masthead redesign, and an option to rename the paper inside eighteen months. "We look for underexploited local media," Goodspeed said. "A masthead nobody currently owns is not a liability. It is a point of entry."
The club's bylaws committee, which would have jurisdiction over any outside use of the Rowayton name in print, did not respond to a message seeking comment by press time.
Siegel said a second edition is already laid out, under the same volume number, now corrected by hand to Vol. XLIV. He said he does not intend to add an editor or an address to future issues, calling both "apparatus."
He said Wednesday's edition will correct the date. He has not decided whether to correct the volume number.
