Sunday, November 27, 2011

Shoving the jocks down our throats

Main entrance of Old Main, at Penn State Unive...
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Since the arrest of a Penn State coach and dismissal of Joe Paterno, perverted football coaches have been coming out of the woodwork.  Was the media ignoring the problem?


In the simple mind of interim Editor Doug Clancy, all football stories are the same -- from the perversions of Penn State to the thuggish players at Wayne Hills High School.


Clancy, like his predecessor, seems to think sports sells the paper, so he is running the Wayne story in the lead position on the front page today -- the fifth time it's been on Page 1 in recent weeks.


Why is this jock-strap itching editor shoving the Wayne farce down Bergen readers' throats when he has a much more suitable place for it, the Passaic-Morris edition?


Clancy boosted the hype of Black Friday sales by running the story on Page 1 on Saturday, so why does he bury the dark side of this naked commercialism on A-15 today?


Road kill


Road Warrior John Cichowski still doesn't get it. Testing the vision and physical coordination of older drivers periodically is far more important than testing their knowledge of driving rules (L-1).


At the bottom of the Local front, a story about a driver who ran into two bicyclists in Saddle River is woefully incomplete.


On L-3, a story about Englewood merchants is the first about that city's downtown in at least five years.


Living dead


The lazy assignment editors do so few profiles of interesting local residents you'd think an obituary about one of them would become a fixture on L-3, where they once ran regularly.


Richard "Ricky Rockit" Torraca, 45, was a drummer and freelance stagehand with hundreds of friends (L-6).


Juvenile journalism


For more than a year now, Better Living staffers have been using their unseasoned palates to test bottled pasta sauces and other food, and  recommending the "best" to readers.


Today, the Consumer Reports of daily newspapers publishes an evaluation of computer tablets on F-1 and F-3.


But what's this juvenile nonsense? Each evaluation lists "sitcom characters who would buy this."


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3 comments:

  1. I know, I thought the article about tablets was not at all impressive, they didn't explain the difference between android models, e-readers, e-readers that also use apps, or anything. The layout was horrible, and when I got to the part where they explained which tv star would purchase each device, I nearly cried.

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  2. I don't like to single out staffers (OK, I do), but when I saw the byline of Mike Kerwick, I understood why the piece sounded so juvenile.

    He's not the first Better Living staffer to invoke sitcoms or the Simpsons in his work for The Record, but his audience isn't all 20 and 30 years old, for crying out loud.

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  3. Where are the Better Living editors when a story like that is turned in. Do they just laugh along with the staffer, spell-check it and allow it to run?

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