A great front page

Image via Wikipedia

The front page of The Record of Woodland Park today is one of the best I've seen recently, especially for a Saturday. The three stories are: a rare, but preventable, death at the Winter Olympics; transcontinental organ transplants involving a North Jersey man and his daughter, and the resignation of a sewerage chief making $313,000.

Only in New Jersey do you get paid that much for a public job supervising how shit flows, though some would say Record Publisher Stephen A. Borg is handsomely rewarded in his private job of supervising a similar flow of manure.

But one thing that mars the front page is an unnecessarily complicated graphic about the kidney transplants that -- instead of telling the story at a glance -- is weighed down by four paragraphs of small type.  

The Record has struggled for years to streamline the process, but its graphics continue to disappoint, largely because they are conceived by head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and her inept minions, not the artists themselves. The reporters and assignment editors who feed words and numbers to the artists bypass the copy desk and invariably make a lot of errors, which the artists simply transfer to the graphic.

When Liz Houlton was put in charge of the news layout and copy desks, she held a number of meetings about graphics, but the initiative lost steam in a newsroom where Sykes' assignment desk insists all problems lie elsewhere. (You should see the sorry collection of shmatas Houlton and Sykes used to wear).

After that great Page 1, the Local section really disappoints, save for the weekly, colorful quotes of the week on the front. Why not run these every day? Looking for education, development or municipal news about Hackensack, Englewood or Teaneck? You won't find any.

I'm really starting to worry about the health and well-being of Monsy Alvarado, the hapless reporter who is supposed to cover Hackensack, the former headquarters of The Record. I hope Sykes hasn't sidelined her again, as she did for about two years to have Alvarado work on the ridiculous "investigation" of lawman Michael Mordaga. The story published Dec. 16 was pathetic -- considering how many reporters worked on it for nearly three years -- and stands as a testament to Sykes' incompetence.