Tales from the old Hackensack newsroom

Image by Bill on Capitol Hill via Flickr

A newspaper copy desk rim and slot long before computers.

When I worked as a news copy editor in The Record's Hackensack newsroom, my chair and computer were near the door to the men's room.  

That seemed appropriate, because too many of the stories we handled were so poorly done, they were the equivalent of shit -- this from the perspective of having been a prize-winning reporter at The Record and two other daily papers. 

I spent many years near the men's room door, processing hundreds of stories by reporters good and bad. I worked with so many assistant assignment editors, I have forgotten all their names, but many of them had one thing in common -- they themselves were mediocre reporters who became mediocre editors and who often knew nothing about the towns their reporters were covering.

Some of the men in the newsroom had appalling bathroom habits. I did my major business at home, but others would disappear into the bathroom with a newspaper, and the noises I could hear were distracting, to say the least. The men's room also needed a system to freshen the air after each toilet flush, but never got it.

But if some of the reporters and editors who used the men's room were slobs, a couple of my colleagues weren't ashamed to do their thing in public, and gross out their desk mates in the process. 

One, across the desk from me, had chronic flatulence, and all the other copy editors could smell his gaseous output, but no supervisor ever spoke to him about the problem. For a number of years, he was supervised by his ex-wife. To make matters worse, this copy editor was given supervisory duties, even though he was among the least productive on the desk.  He is still employed as a copy editor.

The copy editor who sat behind me often picked his nose and fell asleep -- sometimes with his finger still in his nose. The supervisor, or slot, occasionally had to wake him to complete a file and write a headline so we could make deadline.

The news copy editors worked at night, and there was a clear divide between the day and night staffs. The local news assignment desk, headed for many years by Editor Deirdre Sykes, did its best to thwart the copy desk. 

One way was to hold onto a story until a few minutes before deadline to prevent the the copy desk from doing much more than spell-check the text. Sykes specialized in this, along with her peels of laughter that prompted homicidal thoughts in nearby layout editors.

Reporters and their fragile egos were defended no matter how incomplete or how inaccurate or how poorly written their stories were. The assignment desk hated the copy desk, because copy editors were a daily reminder of all the errors the reporters and their supervising editors made, all the garbled writing, all the long and winding lead paragraphs.

It was not uncommon for a reporter covering Englewood or another town to misspell the names of officials, get street names wrong and leave out major information. I lived in Englewood for many years and knew the city better than any reporter or editor in the newsroom.

In the nearly two decades I lived in that city, The Record never reported on the noise from an open-air police firing range, which was used hundreds of days a year and woke residents as early as 8 a.m. with gunshots and shotgun blasts. 

When Staff Writer Deena Yellin was assigned to do a round-up on such police ranges a few years ago, the published story omitted any mention of the one in Englewood, despite having been edited by Assistant Assignment Editor Christina Joseph, who once covered Englewood herself, as did Sykes when she was a reporter for a weekly. 

Editor Francis Scandale was brought in from the Denver Post in 2000 or 2001, and it soon became clear he wanted the copy editors to write great headlines that would sell newspapers, and not to do much more. He even told them to stop calling reporters after they went home about such problems as misspelled names and inaccuracies.

The copy desk was regarded as a scrap heap for older employees. In all my years there, no copy editor was ever promoted to the job of assistant assignment editor.

The paper was so dysfunctional, it had trouble printing and delivering the paper on time, and kept on making the deadline earlier and earlier to accommodate press malfunctions and inclement weather, which would slow the rag-tag fleet of vehicles used by independent deliverers.

Not only was the paper unable to print late sports scores or the results of municipal night meetings, but copy editors often had one to two hours before the end of their shift at 12:45 a.m. with nothing to edit (yet they were denied a dinner break earlier in their shift because of the tight deadlines).  

They, and their supervisors, would use the time at the end of the night to play computer solitaire, write personal e-mails, and plan vacations.      

 

I began free-lancing for the paper's Food section in 1999, and in later years, I would write major pieces or Dining Out on $50 restaurant reviews at the end of my shift, and ask a colleague to look them over before sending them to the food editor. I stopped writing food stories in mid-2006.

I was fired in May 2008 during a downsizing that claimed many veteran employees. After the copy desks of The Record and Herald News were combined, the decline of copy editing continued. Now, inaccurate and dull headlines appear regularly, as do typos and garbled writing, even in lead paragraphs, and stories are published with crucial information missing.

One example occurred just last week, when a 12-year-old boy was killed by an NJ Transit train along an unfenced stretch of track in Hackensack. None of the coverage mentioned he was walking home because Hackensack doesn't provide school busing to students.

What else can you expect when the former Hackensack daily is being run by a flawed journalist,  Scandale, and a bunch of lazy assignment editors who refuse to give copy editors -- with their experience and superior knowledge of North Jersey -- the power they have at many other newspapers. 

Newspaper is rotting away

Image by alex.ragone via Flickr

Thank God for infrastructure. What would the lazy, incompetent editors of The Record of Woodland Park do for a front-page story today if it weren't for the steady stream of transportation meetings, studies, reports and contracts Staff Writer Karen Rouse uses as fodder for her coverage?

Bridges rotting away

That headline is meant to scare readers, though a lot of bridge work she discusses won't get under way until next year. What's really scary is how the former Hackensack daily is rotting away right before our eyes.

And the copy editing on her story today is atrocious. What is the "easterly" Hackensack River bridge? The graphic on A-6 says a "repainting project is under construction." How about just "under way"?

Rouse was an education reporter when she was hand-picked by Editor Frank Scandale to come to The Record from The Denver Post, his old newspaper. Unfortunately, two reporters already were covering education for The Record (never mind that their productivity is among the lowest on the staff). 

So Rouse was given the job of transportation reporter and assignment desk trainee (the hybrid job was never posted in the newsroom); she proved ill-suited for the latter. Now, she writes almost exclusively about infrastructure -- under the guidance of her knuckle-headed assignment editor.

When I was still a news copy editor in Hackensack, she resisted my suggestion she write about deplorable local bus service, saying her assignment editor wouldn't allow her the time to look into anything unless it definitely was going to produce a story. In other words, she said, she couldn't  board a decrepit No. 780 bus at the bus terminal across the street and ride it to Passaic for lunch to see how most of the riders were minorities -- contrasting their ride to the new buses used by mostly white commuters to Manhattan.

One of those white bus riders also lands on Page 1 today, though he and other bus patrons have been virtually ignored by the assignment desk and the transportation writers, including Road Warrior John Cichowski.

Most of Local today is devoted to events that were covered Sunday -- Armenians marking the 95th anniversary of a genocide; a vigil for crime victims in Paterson; a Bergen County recycling day for pack-rats too cheap to buy a home shredder for sensitive documents.

Where is the vigil for readers who have watched coverage of their towns, including Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck, wither and die? When will the editors, including Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, have to answer to the public for the decimation of local news?

I know the Borgs -- or their legal representatives -- read "Eye on The Record" carefully, because they've renewed threats to file a lawsuit against me. But I'd like Malclom, Stephen and Jennifer Borg to pay more attention to how badly the editors are handling their crucial responsibility of informing the public about what is going on in their communities. After all, that is how The Record became a great newspaper -- before Scandale, Sykes, Frank Burgos, Tim Nostrand, Jim McGarvey and their minions tore it down.

Better Living Staff Writer Sachi Fujimori, who I have praised frequently, stumbles badly today with the lead paragraph on the scheduled closing of the Peking Duck House restaurant in Closter. She writes the signature dish "helped grease the wheels of friendship between the U.S. and China" -- a jarring description given how virtually all the fat in Peking duck is removed before it is served.

Where was Food Editor Bill Pitcher or the copy editors on Feature Editor Barbara Jaeger's desk when it came to catching this awkward and inaccurate play on words?

'The fish stinks from the head down'

Frank Scandale was named editor of The Record in 2001 after he helped the Denver Post win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. He was the latest out-of-town editor hired to remake the Hackensack daily. (He grew up in Westfield and worked at the Elizabeth Daily Journal, both outside The Record's circulation area.)

Scandale replaced Vivian Waixel, a Queens native who had worked her way up through the ranks and who I believe was the first woman to become editor. She was named executive editor of The Record and Herald News. Eventually, she left after being offered an office in a converted storage closet with a large window on the Hackensack newsroom.

When he was tested by 9/11, Scandale took part in the bone-headed decision by editors to relegate one of the most powerful images captured by a photographer that day to a back page to save the paper money. (See post, "Major detour on the road to a Pulitzer Prize.")

His reign as editor has been marked by increasing tension and animosity between dayside reporters and editors such as himself  and the nightside staff of news, layout and copy editors, who have been frozen out of decision-making and handcuffed for trying to improve news stories written by an increasingly inexperienced staff. For this reason alone, he should of been replaced long ago. But there is more:

1. He launched news and feature coverage of 20-year-olds in order to win new readers,  ignoring young people's addiction to the computer and that the baby boomers are the ones who have the money to patronize advertisers. In 2006, Publisher Stephen A. Borg called this initiative a "failed strategy."
2. He banned local news stories about one town from the front page, an edict that apparently still stands.
3. He did little to boost the number of minorities in the newsroom (before The Record's and Herald  News' staffs were merged), but did hire three from his old newspaper. And his third managing editor, Frank Burgos, is Hispanic. Still, one black editor left, the paper's only black columnist was fired and the paper's only Latino columnist was told to return exclusively to reporting, leading to his eventual departure.
4. He failed to stand up for his newsroom workers after money for ergonomic furniture was taken out of the budget year after year. Yet enough money was found to buy a dozen or so new, ergonomic desks, chairs and computers for the digital news group, which puts out The Record's online edition, and they were placed smack in the middle of the Hackensack newsroom for all to envy as they continued to use and be injured by furniture dating to the typewriter era.
5. He was rumored to have taken to lunch on separate occasions two of the most attractive young women on the reporting staff. If that is true, was it appropriate for an older editor to have lunch with a young female reporter? Or would a group setting have been wiser, especially in view of  the sexual harassment of women in the newsroom that Scandale and other editors, notably head assignment editor Deirdre Sykes, had long tolerated?  It got so bad at one point that the supervisor of  news clerks stopped hiring young women for the job.

I  have always heard about a Sicilian saying, "The fish stinks from the head down." (It is so appropriate here, given Scandale's Italian heritage.) Now, it's time for The Record to lop off the head and go fishing for a new editor.