Exhausted reporter back in the fray

Image by joseph a via Flickr

After two days off for rest and relaxation, Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado is back on the Hackensack beat, leading The Record of Woodland Park today with bad news for Prospect Avenue high-risers whose parking garage collapsed July 16. They won't be going home until at least Nov. 15.


"Homeless for 4 months," the big, black headline declares -- but the news copy desk is inaccurate on two scores. The tenants are living in hotels or with relatives, so they are far from "homeless." And Nov. 15 is three and a half months away, not four, so maybe the copy desk means four months from the initial collapse. Confusing.

The A-1 patch is about a legal pissing match over who has rights to an "app," and, unfortunately, the story isn't about appetizers. Staff Writer Kibret Markos, who is assigned to the Bergen County Courthouse, is careful to leave to the last paragraph on the jump page that a lawsuit and counter suit are filed in New York, not New Jersey.

In view of all the older workers displaced during the recession -- including a couple of dozen at The Record, thanks to such discriminating managers as Stephen and Jennifer Borg, Frank Scandale, Barbara Jaeger, Liz Houlton and Deirdre Sykes -- I question why Markos and the other courthouse reporters are not covering the many age-discrimination lawsuits that have been filed.

For her A-1 story today, Alvarado covered a meeting  of more than 100 displaced Prospect Avenue tenants organized by a lawyer who represents a half-dozen of them in hopes of hitting a litigation jackpot. That's the easy, superficial way to cover the story -- everybody is in the same place and you don't have to run around chasing people down. 


No representatives of the out-of-town building owners were at the meeting, so there is no comment from the company. Very thorough story. We don't even know if Prospect Avenue remains closed.

There is no other Hackensack news or anything from Teaneck and Englewood in the rest of the paper today.  What a great job "Mother Hen" Sykes is doing as head assignment editor.