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| The Record is recommending a slice of banoffee pie in place of a balanced breakfast. |
When editors elevate the "process" to the front page, they are delivering some of the most eye-glazing, mind-numbing stories imaginable.
Today, Editor Marty Gottlieb of The Record turns off readers with at least three process stories on his premier page -- A-1.
His Eminence, who came to the Woodland Park daily from The New York Times, doesn't seem to know or care that the outcome is Page 1 news -- not the process leading up to it.
Police gun play
The lead story focuses on Garfield police station "protocol" and not whether two officers were justified in using deadly force when they killed Malik Williams, 19, on Dec. 10, 2011.
Only lawyers and judges will read more than a few sentences about Dharun Ravi's "strategy" in appealing his conviction for bias intimidation, which led to the death of Ridgewood's Tyler Clementi.
Quoting experts
Process stories have another thing in common, besides being boring:
They often are based on quotes from "experts," such as Eugene O'Donnell, whose affiliation consumes nearly four sentences in the second paragraph of the lead A-1 story on Williams, the black teen from Garfield.
On the front of Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes signed off on another Road Warrior column based entirely on readers' e-mails about MVC lines and other minutiae (L-1).
How many of the e-mails are real and how many are fabricated by a columnist desperate to fill space three times a week -- under Sykes' wet-noodle lashes?
Where is Stanley?
The Record was responsible for getting Stanley Kowalski, an 82-year-old homeless man who almost blew himself up, evicted from a motel last week.
Today, an L-3 story reports Kowalski has been moved to a nursing home from a hospital.
A follow-up story on Thursday will discuss whether he is having regular bowel movements.
Another crash photo
Sykes needed another non-fatal accident photo to fill out L-3 today after her lazy, incompetent minions failed to produce any news from Hackensack and many other towns.
Cardiac-surgery units at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, and other hospitals, are preparing beds after Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill published a pie recipe that calls for two sticks of butter and one cup of heavy cream (F-1 and F-2).
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To be fair, Marty was probably distracted yesterday. He probably spent the day following the events in Toulouse and remembering the nights with influential friends sipping drinks in Montmartre. Different reality.
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