Good morning everyone! Allow me to introduce myself as I transition into these wonderful new digs as the Editor of the East Providence Post.

My name is Ethan Hartley, and it’s so very nice to meet you.

When the opportunity first came up for me to take this role, my initial reaction was to be excited at the opportunity to learn more about the people, places, and history that makes East Providence such a vibrant and thriving community. That feeling has only grown as I start to search around for story ideas and begin to introduce myself to the city.

Of course, there was some trepidation, too. I came to East Bay Media Group in July of 2021 as the editor of the Bristol Phoenix and the Warren Times-Gazette, a role that immediately captured my heart and made me fall in love with the East Bay; which I now advertise to the uninitiated as the most undeniably overlooked and best overall region in the entire state of Rhode Island.

It can be difficult to leave a place of relative comfort, which Bristol/Warren had become in just over three short years of working within those communities. However, the gravitational pull towards East Providence is one that, upon some reflection, I realize has been happening for a long time now.

My first job in Rhode Island, which allowed me to move to the state from my native Massachusetts (North Reading, 30 minutes north of Boston, in case you were wondering), only came to fruition because of a cosmically unlikely series of coincidences (or fate, depending on your beliefs) that began over in Riverside at the Squantum Association all the way back in 2017.

At that time, my then-girlfriend (now wife, a Warwick native) was attending a gala for her relatively new job working as a marketing associate for The Wolf School, which some of you may recognize as a respected special education school over in Rumford on Ferris Avenue. I tagged along in support, and struck up a random conversation with someone I would later learn to be Scott Pickering, the general manager at East Bay Media Group. Although they weren’t hiring at the time, he got me in touch with John Howell, who for many decades was the publisher of three fine local papers in Cranston, Warwick, and Johnston.

That set in motion my entire career arc from then on, and a lot has changed for the better since then. I was able to buy a house with my wife in Cranston in 2018, where we still live today with our beloved rescue, Annie. Eventually, fate would again intervene when Scott called me out of the blue when a position at East Bay became available, which brought me to Bristol and Warren — and now here.

So let’s recap that, because it still blows my mind. A Massachusetts kid meets a Rhode Island girl at Suffolk University in Boston in 2011. Years later, he goes to an event in East Providence, where he randomly strikes up a conversation with his girlfriend’s boss’s significant other, who just so happens to be running newspapers for communities in the East Bay. They hit it off, and seven years after that, I find myself now as the editor of the newspaper that would ostensibly cover a newsworthy event at the Squantum Association.

Talk about full circle!

So I feel good about this, and I hope you do too, because it seems like we were meant to be together, East Providence.

I hope that you will find I try my very best to perform my job with the utmost care, attention to detail, and genuine effort to entertain and inform you; whether the news is good, bad, or somewhere in between. I have built my now decade-long career on being someone who is approachable, who will listen to all sides of an argument, and honestly report those sides to help people make up their own minds about the local issues that affect them in the most important ways.

A little about me: I love the outdoors (beaches in the summer, the woods every other season), I will ask to pet your dog if I’m walking in your vicinity, and in the last couple months I have become obsessed with pre-1970s manual typewriters (I already own two, and the only reason I don’t own more yet is because I value my wife’s sanity). I am also a coffee snob, so recommendations to the best East Providence cafes would be more than appreciated.

In the coming weeks, I look forward to getting to know you better as well. Send me any news tips or just say hello by emailing me at the address under my byline. See you out in the city!