Leaving readers in the dark

Image via Wikipedia

Staff Writer Joseph Ax, on assignment for The Record in Haiti, seems to be fascinated with the pre-dawn darkness or maybe he is just trying to show the lazy, desperate and incompetent editors back home in Woodland Park that he is working hard amid all the cutbacks at the paper.

For the third day in a row, he begins his dispatch with something that happened before the sun rose on the humanitarian crisis there (the first day, it was volunteers gathering for breakfast in the lobby of a Dominican hotel). It's hard to tell if his dispatches are getting any editing on the assignment desk or the news copy desk.

This could be a case of head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes holding the story past deadline, then sending it over with some excuse so the news copy editors don't have time to question or edit it. Unlike the shrieking Sykes, they're expected to make deadline, so they just have time to slap headlines on it, write photo captions and spell-check the file.

Unable to come up with news of Hackensack (map), Teaneck, Englewood or other important Bergen County towns, editors have to run large and small photos on the front of Local about a Haitian relief drive by Dominicans in Paterson, sending readers to L-6 to read  a detailed story. This follows numerous stories about such efforts by Haitians, doctors, pastors and other North Jerseyans after the Jan. 12 quake, in an apparent bid to chronicle the sending of every T-shirt to the stricken nation.

More drivel by Columnist Mike Kelly also appears on the front of the section. This is "one of those small North Jersey stories that could easily go unnoticed," he writes, "amid the hustle and bustle that passes for life" -- just like Kelly's pushing around words passes for journalism. This so-called story should have gone unnoticed because it's been done a million times. Is this the best local story the veteran journalist can come up with? Where is his assignment editor, staring down the shirt of an attractive, young female reporter?