9/11 is all about selling cars

The New World Trade Center is a single tower reaching for the sky.

A decade ago, Editor Francis Scandale blew the chance of a lifetime to scoop his competition with a front page carrying a unique image of hope from Staff Photographer Thomas E. Franklin of The Record.

Today, amid all the 10th anniversary coverage in the Sunday paper, readers are given a copy of Franklin's photo showing three firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

But the copyrighted photo -- roughly 8 by 10 inches on glossy paper stock -- is sponsored by a car dealer, and on the other side, readers find an ad for All American Ford on River Street, less than a mile from the old headquarters of The Record and North Jersey Media Group.

Is there some reason the NJMG Foundation couldn't sponsor a non-commercial distribution of Franklin's photo? How low can the Borgs go?

A week's reading

It will probably take a normal reader a week to plow through all the 9/11 anniversary coverage today, though some people will just take it straight to the recycling bin.

Many sections carry 9/11 stories, including Sports, which claims the attack on America "affected sports forever." What a hoot.

Then, there's a 20-page special section filled with the accounts of family members who lost someone on 9/11. Tim Nostrand, the Sunday/projects editor, refers to them as "survivors."

Front-page flop

Scandale gives Columnist Mike Kelly top billing on Page 1 today, and Kelly disappoints again. Would you get a load of that phony smile in Kelly's photo.

Kelly's first paragraph takes readers to Texas, where two survivors of 9/11 who once lived in New Jersey meet for dinner and .... I've lost interest already.

There are more 9/11 stories through Page A-9.

Local law-breakers

On the front of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, Road Warrior John Cichowski, a former radio reporter, peddles a column about another radio reporter on 9/11.

The main element on the page is about a motorcycle club honoring a fallen Port Authority cop after more than 75 members broke the anti-noise ordinances of every town they rode through to get to the cemetery.

Praising Mac's pal

In Business, a glowing 16-inch story about real estate executive Jon F. Hanson makes no mention of his close relationship with Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg, chairman of North Jersey Media Group, or their joint ownership of a corporate jet (B-5).

In Better Living, Staff Writer Elisa Ung's Sunday column, The Corner Table, is supposed to be about challenges facing restaurant goers, but today she turns her back on readers again and writes about challenges facing a chef who runs a farm-to-table restaurant in far off Somerset County (F-1).

On the front of Opinion, readers find two self-serving columns by Kelly and Scandale on the experiences of reporters, editors, photographers and other journalists on 9/11.

Flawed journalist

Scandale's trite column is flawed from the outset, with a first paragraph that is awkwardly written and missing a word or two:

"Not in my wildest imaginations could I have envisioned what life would be like 10 years after the Twin Towers collapsed in the distance from my office window."

He meant to write that he saw the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan collapse from the window of his office on the fourth floor of the old newsroom in Hackensack.

But then Scandale isn't big enough to admit that he failed miserably as a journalist on 9/11, when he relegated Franklin's incredible flag-raising photo to a back page, instead of ordering the layout editors to tear up the front page to accommodate an image no other newspaper had.

"I remember our photo chief, Rich Gili, yelling, 'That's it!' when [P]hotographer Tom Franklin's now-famous image" appeared on the computer screen "where we retrieved our photos from the field."

Scandale doesn't tell readers Gili was waiting all day for a unique image that would advance the story for The Record and help the paper stand out among the competition, and he saw it in Franklin's photo.

Scandale also doesn't tell readers how he bowed to pressure from the bean counters, who told him it would cost too much to re-make the front page for Franklin's photo.

More than a decade after he joined the paper in early 2001, Scandale remains an uninspiring leader.

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