Editor lives to sell newspapers

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Should a local newspaper put the Steve Jobs obit on Page 1?

What kind of news world does Editor Francis Scandale of the Record inhabit?


Scandale is not accountable to the public or his absentee publisher, so he's accustomed to doing what he wants with Page 1.


His only problems are his famously flawed news judgment and wrestling stories away from Deirdre Sykes, the immovable head assignment editor and real power in the Woodland Park newsroom.


The murder of a 23-year-old Teaneck woman wasn't front-page news on Wednesday, but the arrest of her husband leads the paper today. Why? To sell newspapers?


Then, Scandale demotes to the bottom of the page an engaging story about more aggressive forms of cancer in African-American women than in white women. That would have made a great A-1 patch.


Here's Job 1


A-1 is dominated today by the obituary of Steve Jobs, 56, a founder of Apple Inc., but why does Scandale put his death from cancer out front while uniformly banishing obituaries of prominent local residents to inside Local? 


Unfortunately, Jobs and other tech wizards have paid little attention to how their computers and smart phones continue to confound people 50 years old and older. 


So, it's no surprise Scandale makes such a big deal of his death. 


The editor has always ignored older newsroom workers, and apparently made no objection when Publisher Stephen A. Borg culled them as if they were chickens on the way to the slaughterhouse. 


No gold standard


One of those given the heave-ho was Nancy Cherry, co-slot or co-supervisor of the news copy desk, now in the incompetent hands of Editor Liz Houlton.


When Nancy left, no one bothered to enforce her strict standards of good writing and accuracy in text, photo captions and headlines.


So, today and nearly every day, the news copy desk runs wild, as in the A-1 headline for the Jobs story.


The co-founder of Apple Inc. becomes the "founder" in the four-deck headline. Two headline no-nos are ending a line with "was" or "of" -- both are violated here. 


Another inaccurate, inelegant and unimaginative headline. On Page 1, no less.


On A-2, there are three embarrassing corrections, one blamed "on incorrect information" from Englewood.


Remixing old news


The front of Sykes' Local section today seems to rehash a lot of old news.


Those Westwood and Hillsdale residents are demanding a solution to flooding, as they did a few weeks ago.


I didn't see any publicity in The Record about last weekend's Korean harvest festival in Bergen County, but here is a story about a second Korean festival, this one sponsored by a New York City group.


Another glowing downtown success story appears at the bottom of the page --this one on Glen Rock, where Scandale lives -- in contrast to total neglect of struggling downtowns in Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck, the county's most diverse communities.


Police news and news about the police -- not municipal news -- again dominate the section put out by Sykes and her supremely lazy assignment minions.


Cutting to the bone


In Better Living, I no longer see anything from free-lance food writer Amy Kuperinsky, who wrote numerous Starters and Martketplaces in recent years.


Today's Starter, "a first look at recently opened restaurants," is by Bob Probert, whose work has also appeared in (201) magazine.


Related articles

• Another puzzler from Liz Houlton's copy desk (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Where quality control is out of control (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Why isn't anyone held accountable? (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)

Defending the status quo

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Map shows Teaneck's position in Bergen County.

In a region filled with small towns and bloated salaries for police and fire chiefs, you'd think The Record of Woodland Park would have lashed out at the police union for blocking Teaneck's plan to save taxpayers $250,000 a year by replacing two chiefs with a public safety director.

Staff Writer Joseph Ax reported the proposal in August and the Township Council's approval in September, but head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes never ran a story pointing out how neighboring Hackensack and Englewood have Police and Fire Departments that are also ripe for a single leader to produce the same significant cost savings in their communities.

So, where is the editorial today blasting Teaneck officials for abolishing the newly created public safety director position, which would have paid $110,000 a year (L-2, Wednesday)? Where is the supposed outrage over skyrocketing property taxes under the antiquated home-rule system? 

 Westward bias

Readers in Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck know how little news coverage they've received in recent years -- with Sykes and her clueless minions running the show -- but now they have evidence that Sykes, Editor Francis Scandale and Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin are really defenders of the status quo. 

Instead of running an editorial about Teaneck police, Doblin is foaming at the mouth over the golden parachute for Paterson's police chief. That's in line with the greater emphasis on news of Passaic and Morris counties since The Record moved to Woodland Park and, out of incompetence or sheer laziness, reduced coverage of Bergen County.

Does Sykes expect readers to take her seriously when she gives L-1 play today to a story on tiny Demarest studying whether to share "police services" with Closter and Haworth? Besides shared police-dispatching duties, when has any Bergen County town ever approved consolidation with another town's police department?

Francis loves Pablo

Was Scandale upset when he learned he had hard news and a dramatic photo of a rescue for the front page today -- a male driver was killed by a falling tree during Wednesday's furious rain and wind storm, but his wife survived? 

That meant the editor couldn't run another one of those "lost" Picassos on Page 1 or a photo of football or baseball players or more drivel from Staff Writer John Brennan on the future of the Meadowlands. That meant he didn't get to high-five and slap the asses of the other male editors in Wednesday afternoon's news meeting.

Look at this brilliant sentence in the A-1 storm story:

"No other serious injuries were reported, but headaches and a few minor injuries were reported across North Jersey ...."

If the newspaper is going to start reporting headaches, it will have an endless stream of copy to run, especially in view of all the headaches readers get from poor local news coverage and inane editorial decisions under Scandale and Sykes.

Lots of free publicity

Just about two weeks after a big story on the first Business page gave a million dollars of free publicity to Capital Grille, a new high-end steakhouse in Paramus, another lavish, uncritical piece on the same restaurant appears today on the front of Better Living.


Free-lancer Amy Kuperinsky doesn't tell readers whether the beef is naturally raised, but she takes pains to get in a plug for Bahama Breeze in Wayne, a faux-Caribbean restaurant that is owned by the steakhouse chain. Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung forever cheapened her ratings by giving two stars (Good) to Bahama Breeze.


The other food story on the Better Living front is a fascinating glimpse at kosher recipes from a Teanfly woman who grew up in South Africa, but crass commercialism intrudes when readers turn to the continuation page, F-5.


"Quick bites," from Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill, are press releases from companies that send her free food and other items.


She discusses a new book on her bedside table, "Celebrity Chefs of New Jersey." Sherrill, a chatty, pretentious airhead, says in her last sentence:

"Sadly, the Chefs to Watch chapter includes the late Joe Cerniglia of Campania in Fair Lawn, who took his own life in September."

I'm sure she means his death was sad, not that his being featured in the book is sad, but the features copy desk has never met a sentence it knew how to edit. That's as true now as it was when frumpy Production Director Liz Houlton was running the desk.

Cure for a bad newspaper?

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This is the post for Friday, July 23, 2010.

If you doubt the front page of The Record of Woodland Park is for sale to the highest bidder, just look at the ridiculous story filed by Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson today. Page 1 clearly shows the desperate editors are ready to prostitute themselves at the drop of a big name.

Those laughable, Cold War-era Russian spies were swapped more than two weeks ago, and readers promptly forgot about a story that didn't amount to anything in the first place. But here is Jackson and Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale selling out to the well-oiled Hollywood publicity machine by linking the spies to "Salt," a movie starring Angelina Jolie that, guess what, opened today. There's also a lukewarm review in Better Living. 

In view of the downsizing of The Record and Herald News and the decline of  local news, can the former Hackensack daily really afford a Washington correspondent? Couldn't Jackson be of better use in Trenton or Woodland Park? How much does he actually contribute? If today's story is any example of his worth, I say, Throw the bum out.


The Local news section is a standing joke, thanks to head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, who has so many "pals" among local reporters, productivity has plummeted.


Road Warrior John Cichowski has an L-1 column today on roadside curiosities. Gee-whiz.  Approaching his seventh anniversary as a columnist, he has become a curiosity.


Leading A-1, Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado and Staff Writer Nick Clunn weigh in with the seventh straight day of coverage on the Prospect Avenue parking-garage collapse, in a story that demonstrates the continuing decline of assigning, reporting, writing and copy editing at the paper.

The collapse occurred last Friday or seven days ago, not six, as she reports. She says residents removed "select belongings" from their apartments. What kind of belongings are those? 

In all seven days of coverage, readers never get any real sense of what it means to be thrown out of a luxury apartment in a heat wave, possibly without a car. Alvarado never spent any time with the evacuees or told of their experiences. Today, she reports the new Mercedes of one tenant, a trauma surgeon, was crushed, but doesn't tell readers how the woman has been getting around.

TV news says the building's landlord is paying tenants' hotel bills and other expenses, but are the tenants still required to pay rent? Your guess is as good as mine.


Local has no municipal news from Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood today. The paper didn't correct Thursday's error on when the Hackensack budget was adopted, nor has there ever been a story on the budget and tax levy. The reporter, Erik Shilling, had the wrong month.


On L-2, the caption with a photo of Paterson's new mayor doesn't explain why he held his inaugural ball in Garfield.


In Better Living, Food Editor Bill Pitcher seems to have a lot of reservations about food quality and preparation at Segovia Steakhouse in Little Ferry, yet he gives it a two-star rating. He refers to mussels he didn't eat -- because they were so foul-smelling he "couldn't get more than a few" past his nose -- as a "ration," a word better suited to describe military or prison slop.


In Starters on Page 17 of Better Living, free-lancer Amy Kuperinsky misspells the Greek word for large lima beans. They are called gigantes or giants.

 (Photo: Hollywood studios in 1922.)

Keeping the story alive to sell papers

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Does anybody but Governor Christie and the media think a union leader's satirical memo was a death threat, and deserves A-1 play today? Does anybody but The Record of Woodland Park and the rest of the media take the racist, hate-mongering Tea Party seriously (three prominent stories in two days, including a Page 1 story Thursday)? 

Did you hear the sound bite on network news from a Tea Party member saying President Obama is doing exactly what Hitler did? Of course, the unseen reporter didn't want to  ruin it by asking this pitiful man to explain his ridiculous comparison. The Record is complicit in this kind of inflammatory coverage. The lazy, incompetent editors and the Borgs -- absentee landlords whose support for them is unwavering -- just want to sell papers.


In an earlier post, I noted the pathetic coverage of Hackensack and other Bergen County towns and attributed this to head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes:

"Hey, look at all this local news. Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha (eventually merging into a shriek that rolls across the Woodland Park newsroom). Aren't we having fun covering every town but Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895?"

Publisher John Borg (1922-48) and Editor Donald G. Borg (1932-75) must be turning over in their graves, and if this news blackout keeps up, former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg may meet an early grave.

A lawyer for North Jersey Media Group actually asked Superior Court Judge Joseph S. Conte last week to preserve its right to sue "Eye on The Record" for defamation, calling what I said about Malcolm Borg "a threat." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?


Do you wonder why Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin spends so much time beating up on teachers and so little on condemning the governor for pandering to the Borgs and other rich families, screwing just about everybody else and refusing to ease his budget woes by taxing the wealthy and raising the low gasoline levy?


Look in vain for Hackensack news in Local today. Why does picking yet another developer for a Fort Lee parcel vacant for three decades merit L-1 coverage? Syracuse University alumni in North Jersey also is a non-story. But the story on the Teaneck superintendent -- scolded for urging voters to approve the school budget -- to me, that's front-page news.


Columnist John "Pothole" Cichowski actually writes today that "public transportation [is] still in its adolescence." That's not true, but readers may not know that from his hundreds of columns about drivers and the anti-mass transit screes from Transportation Reporter Tom Davis.



In Better Living today, freelancer Amy Kuperinsky tells readers a new Japanese restaurant in Fort Lee wants "North Jerseyans dining on this side of the Hudson River to be privy to the type of yakitori ... prevalent in the East Village." That undoubtedly will come as a surprise to the owners of Yakitori 39 on DeGraw Avenue in Teaneck (that, I recall, Kuperinsky wrote about last year).