Saturday, June 9, 2012

Editors ignore broken home-rule system

House of Sforza
A relative of Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza was an editor at one of Italy's first newspapers. Here, he prays for good news.


The big front-page news today is an apparent sickout by more than 100 members of the public school staff in Englewood.

But The Record's editors don't explore the real story: the broken home-rule system of financing education.

Even the headline is inaccurate, lumping in school secretaries with teachers and professional assistants, who are called "educators."

Lazy editors

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza both covered Englewood as reporters -- Sykes for a weekly newspaper, Sforza for The Record -- but their coverage of the city's schools in the past decade couldn't be more flawed.

Despite reaping property taxes from hundreds of big homes on the East Hill -- including the mansion of Chairman and former Publisher  Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg -- and from a large industrial area, the city has allowed its public schools to limp along.

Minority schools

The elementary and middle schools are mostly black and Hispanic, and there hasn't been a story about desegregation efforts at the high school for a couple of years.

Wealthy residents on a panel advising the mayor recommended and eventually pushed through cuts in public library funding. 

And a Hebrew charter school threatens to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars in public school funds to educate rich students.

$4 million deficit

Finally, do two large private-school campuses hurt the public schools by luring away most of the white students, and just how much does their tax-exempt status cost the city? 

Sykes and Sforza don't think any of that is important.

In the past three days, The Record has reported the school district faces a $4 million deficit and hopes to save $2 million by outsourcing the jobs of teaching assistants and school secretaries, but readers remain in the dark on what caused the deficit.

Horsing around

Editor Marty Gottlieb doesn't seem to notice the holes in the Englewood coverage, preferring to devote valuable space on Page 1 today to the enormous value of a race horse's schlong.

Staff Writer John Rowe is a sports columnist who has been covering horse racing so long he appears to have been embalmed.

But his A-1 piece today doesn't answer the question in every reader's mind: Just how big is a horse's $10 million penis?

Railroading readers

The front of Sykes' Local section focuses today on pedestrians who "trespass" near railroad tracks and ignores whether NJ Transit had added any safety measures to prevent deaths and suicides (L-1).

There is so little news from Hackensack and other towns, Sykes and Sforza needed a photo of a minor minivan fire on Paterson's Eastside to fill out L-2 of the Bergen Edition.

Sforza sent out the ambulance-chasing photographer so late, the photo shows four firefighters, standing next to the vehicle and bullshiting.

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6 comments:

  1. Cheap shot at Rowe, who happens to be younger than you.

    In any case, you should be the last person to mock older writers, given your age-discrimination suit against NJMG.

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  2. "10 Million Penis" would be a great name for a band.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks. Would sound better in the plural, 10 Million Penises.

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  4. I have no problem with older writers. I do have a problem with newspapers allowing one person to do the same job for eons.

    Need I point out all of The Record staffers who are ineffective, irresponsible and just plain lazy?

    The list begins with Deirdre Sykes, Liz Houlton, Tim Nostrand and Dan Sforza, and continues with the paper's boring columnists, John Cichowski, Mike Kelly and Bill Ervolino, who is about as funny as the prevalence of cancer in New Jersey.

    And so on and so forth.

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  5. Best photo caption yet!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks. Look how far the Sforza family has fallen.

    ReplyDelete

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