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The Penn State Lion Shrine. Students who rioted did a good imitation of wild animals.
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By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
With dogs and cats on the front page today, cows on A-2 and a bunch of animals from Penn State on A-5, you could argue The Record's editors are inhuman.
You wouldn't get any push back from former newsroom employees whose lives were ruined by the mercurial Stephen A. Borg, Barbara Jaeger, Deirdre Sykes and Francis "Frank" Scandale.
The Page 1 story on how "pets suffer in hard times" may pull many readers' heart strings, but others will wonder why the paper writes so little about how humans and Main Street businesses have fared during the recession.
Dog eat dog
Anyway, interim Editor Doug Clancy, aren't millions of unwanted pets destroyed every year in good times and bad? Why is this Page 1 news -- outside of you didn't have anything else?
The lead story today is another speculative one from Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher on how much money the state will save from high-deductible health plans for public workers.
But Clancy and the assignment desk should have known this story sounds just like the four or five earlier accounts she wrote about health-care and pension savings.
Why not wait until the savings are realized and then report them?
For development
As usual, Staff Writer John Brennan comes down on the developer's side in another A-1 story today, this one about an expansion of the former Xanadu project into 5 acres of sensitive wetlands.
The Penn State story completely omits how a student protest turned into a riot after head coach Joe Paterno was fired last week in a child sex-abuse scandal. Who knows whether any of the students shown in an A-5 photo took part in the rock-throwing and other violence.
Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section is filled with soft weekend news.
Hackensack residents, among others, continue to wait for the end of a news drought.
Food fight
On the front of Better Living today, the highly promotional Starters column on recently opened restaurants is unusually long and carries a new byline, Joyce Venezia Suss (F-1).
It's hard to tell whether Suss knows anything about the origin of food from this sentence about an Irish pub:
"Ingredients are a particular source of pride and include certified Angus beef, hormone-free poultry and seasonal sustainable seafood ...."
Certified Angus Beef is nothing special; it is raised conventionally, with antibiotics and growth hormones.
Federal law prohibits hormones in poultry, so it's possible the chicken and other poultry served at this pub were raised on antibiotics and animal byproducts.
That doesn't sound like anything a restaurant owner would be proud of.
You want to talk missed stories? How about the drama that played out at Bergen Regional yesterday -- as covered in Cliffview Pilot?
ReplyDeleteArmless woman (yes) climbed a fire escape and threatened to jump, holding negotiators at bay for nearly two hours. Lots of police agencies there, streets blocked, quite a commotion.
Nothing in The Record.
Nor did it have the REAL story (when it finally published one a day later) about the discovery of the "missing" woman from Saddle Brook -- who was neither "missing" NOR FROM SADDLE BROOK!
And so it goes....
Now Victor, you succeeded in getting Mister Ass Slapping Scandale fired, how about cutting the new features writer some slack. She did go farther than Elisa in at least pointing out that the ingredients were natural and the beef was certified Angus, which at least costs more so it must be better for you right? If you want to criticize something, you could have asked what an Irish pub is doing with a cow named Angus, who would seem to be Scottish.
ReplyDeleteCares, Who?
ReplyDeleteShe might not be new, just from (201) magazine.
ReplyDelete