'Pushing a bucket of turds up the hill'

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The Record's many turd-filled wheelbarrows have flat tires.

Nancy Cherry supervised me when I was a news copy editor at The Record, and for years, she urged the newspaper to highlight a "Quote of the Day" from the stories we edited night after night. 

Of course, Nancy, Co-Slot Vinny Byrne and everybody else associated with the news copy desk were treated like so much shit by Editor Francis Scandale, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and their minions, and her idea went nowhere. A couple of years ago, the former Hackensack daily began running great quotes weekly, not daily.

Today, on the front page, a "Quote of the Day" jumped out at me, and it resonates with meaning on so many levels:

"This is like pushing a bucket of turds up the hill and the wheelbarrow has flat tires," said not-quite-Sisyphus Thomas J. Powell, one of the Passaic Valley sewerage commissioners who resigned, explaining he didn't have the strength to fight ethics charges threatened by Governor Christie.

You can apply this quote to readers, who are saddled every day with a newspaper that slants stories to make Christie look great, that raises questions and never answers them, that writes inaccurate headlines and rarely corrects them, and that day after day, allows the laziness of the editors and some of the staff to determine what's covered.  

If you think of a wheelbarrow as a conveyance, then the turds could represent the flawed stories written by everyone from Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson down to the inexperienced weekly reporters whose stories fill Sykes' Local section.

If you think of a wheelbarrow as representing the newsroom, then the turds could be Scandale and  all of the clueless assignment and features editors, as well as reporters like Jean Rimbach who do as little as possible and get away with it, because they are Sykes' pals.

If you think of a wheelbarrow as management, then the turds could be Jennifer A. and Stephen A.  Borg, the spoiled siblings who pushed their ailing father aside and started the hometown paper down a slippery slope of cost-cutting and bare-bones municipal news coverage.

A turd from D.C.

Just look at the turd that leads the Woodland Park paper today, reported and written by Jackson, one of the staffers who make the mistake of thinking readers are as fascinated by politics as they are, and that every story has to be defined by how many tax dollars are spent improperly. 

The headline is ridiculous. Who can figure out what the story is about?

Taxpayer

time spent

helping

campaigns

The drop headline tells readers more, but awkwardly:

Bush aides improperly

aided in N.J., report says

What is "taxpayer time"? Whose campaigns? "Improperly aided in N.J."? 

Why not just say -- in the head and in the lead paragraph -- that Bush officials broke the law to campaign for New Jersey Republicans. 

Jackson wrote this Page 1 turd, but who edited it? Was it Sykes, who would let out shrieks of laughter when she was on the phone editing stories by Jackson and the Trenton reporters? Or was she in the bathroom, eliminating her own turds, when this story just went through with no thought at all given to clarity and grabbing the reader?

History repeats itself

At a news meeting 10 years ago, shortly after moving from Denver to take over as editor, Scandale assessed how well his new staff had done on covering a major snowstorm. He was pissed.

Nothing has changed. Many towns did a poor job of clearing streets, sidewalks and bus stops after the post-Christmas blizzard that hit North Jersey at the end of 2010, and The Record's coverage was as inadequate as it was in 2001.

On A-10, a letter to the editor from Ciro DiSclafani of Garfield asks, "How pedestrian-friendly is your town?" 

It's the paper that should be reporting what this man says in his letter about "improperly cleared intersections and bus stops," and the dangers to pedestrians, mothers with strollers and others who are forced into the street. 

If you drove around Hackensack today, as I did, it was immediately apparent that city crews did a poor job on intersections and bus stops, just as they did after the blizzard and other major storms.

Snowplows appear to crisscross each other, but not turn corners, leaving a mess at intersections that forces pedestrians to wade through a foot or more of snow and drivers to make wide turns. Euclid Avenue, an unusually wide street with two-way traffic, was reduced to one lane.

If anyone should be sympathetic to pedestrians having to cope with snow, it would be Sykes, who fell on her well-padded posterior in the Hackensack parking lot one winter. 

It's true that one of her reporters, Karen Rouse, wrote about pedestrians recently, but she didn't venture any farther than a few blocks from her Hackensack apartment.

Rich and powerful

The 2011 PEOPLE TO WATCH feature today focuses on one of the richest, most powerful men in North Jersey, appropriately "brought to you by" a luxury car dealer's ad above the fold. Check out the photo of Orin S. Kramer in his $3,000 suit.

It took Sykes and her staff about six weeks to notice how many homeless people have been wandering around in the cold this winter, and today, we get the second major story in three days on their plight (L-1).

Poor reporting

On L-3 today, Staff Writer Shawn Boburg finally contacted a railroad spokeswoman to confirm that warning lights were working properly at the Franklin Lakes crossing where a man drove his SUV into a moving train, killing his friend.

In his major story on Wednesday, Boburg left conflicting information on the warning lights unresolved, and no editor noticed or cared.

Unfair to Fairway

The second round of marinara-sauce testing by the Better Living staff today again omits the great sauce sold under the Fairway Market label in Paramus.

A skeleton Sunday paper

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If you've been wondering what Staff Writer Colleen Diskin has been doing in the months since the editors took her Mother Load column away (without notice to readers), you can see the fruits of her labor on Page 1 today -- and for another two and a half pages inside The Record of Woodland Park.


Her story -- on  youth baseball teams' endless seasons -- is endless itself, and there are four more parts to the series coming! 

Jeez, Colleen, didn't head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes let you wile away the months like Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado did on the so-called investigation of Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa or like Alvarado, Staff Non-Writer Jean Rimbach and others did when they wasted nearly three years on the vendetta against former Hackensack Chief of Detectives Michael Mordaga? 

Readers with kids playing baseball might be glued to the page, but the majority of readers won't be. And what do they get to read of interest to them? Not much.


This Sunday paper is a ghost of past editions. Hasn't there been enough coverage of the conflict between Governor Christie and his education commissioner? Does Columnist Mike Kelly really add anything or is he, as usual, just running in place? Can't he find a more compelling topic? Maybe he should ride one of the decrepit local buses that pass through Teaneck, where he lives, and report on how poorly NJ Transit treats minority riders.

I wish we could dismantle Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski's mind to find out why he has totally abandoned his mission of writing about the commuting woes of drivers and mass transit users, in favor of columns on car theft, potholes, the Route 80 exit to the Woodland Park office and all the other nonsense he spends time exploring. 

Shame on Sykes, who picked Cichowski to write the column in late 2003 and hasn't noticed how boring his stuff has become. The column has become a public disservice.


In Local, there are stories about a teacher, students or education in Bergenfield, Tenafly, Paramus and the Pascack Valley, but not a word about Hackensack and Englewood schools. Nor is there any other news today about those important Bergen County communities or Teaneck.


To ensure that today's Travel section contains no useful information for readers planning vacations, photos from Readers on the Road cover all of Page T-3 today, and the editors couldn't get Travel Editor Jill Schensul to shut up about her cruise through Europe. 

Why Publisher Stephen A. Borg folded the Food section and allowed the thin Travel section to survive is known only to him. It's curious that Schensul is an animal lover who rarely runs stories on restaurants and cuisine, one of the main reasons people travel.

Not on list of Pulitzer finalists this year

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The Asbury Park Press and Star-Ledger were finalists this year in the Pulitzer Prize journalism competition, but The Record of Woodland Park wasn't -- despite sacrificing local news to carry on investigations that stretch on and on under the unsteady guidance of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, whose weird and constant  laughter in the newsroom drives coworkers crazy. (Photo: Pulitzer Prize.)

The 2010 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting went to a series that sounds suspiciously like an investigation The Record did in 2005 or 2006 about a privately run preschool program for minority children led by Jean Rimbach, a reporter whose byline appears infrequently -- a two-year gap in not unusual. (Rimbach led the pathetic, Sykes-inspired vendetta against Michael Mordaga that took nearly three years and resulted in a single, weak L-1 story.) Here is the citation:

Awarded to Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for her penetrating reports on the fraud and abuse in a child-care program for low-wage working parents that fleeced taxpayers and imperiled children, resulting in a state and federal crackdown on providers.

 I was on the news copy desk and edited Rimbach's series. The first of three parts ran under my headline:

"PUBLIC MONEY, PRIVATE GREED"

I had to make the headline strong because the stories were so weak and full of holes, despite the many months devoted to them. I recall going to Sykes with questions and concerns about the stories, and her replying, "We didn't get that." or "We're not going there."

When the series won a minor journalism prize, a story in The Record never gave me credit for my role -- typical of how Sykes and her assignment desk treated copy editors like shit. Even my supervisors, Vinny Byrne and Nancy Cherry, failed to mention my several days of work on the series in my performance review.