Editors turn tragedy into comedy

This is an article published in The New York Times on Dec. 15, 1915, on the Armenian genocide. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The geniuses on The Record's night copy desk took their lead from The Associated Press, the news wire service widely known as The Associated Mess.

So, the line over today's Page 1 photo seems comical.

"SUSPECT'S DAZED LOOK ANGERS FAMILIES."

"Dazed"? The suspect is a madman who killed 12 people in a movie theater in Colorado.  Of course, he looks dazed.

The comedic aspect is emphasized by the use of five photos of the suspect's clown-colored hair (A-1 and A-5).

Localizing the news

Editor Marty Gottlieb tried to "localize" the Colorado story with two sidebars -- one on the Bergen County native who is running the Aurora, Colo., Police Department, and the other quoting Governor Christie, who shoots off his big mouth on gun control.

On A-1, the first story calls the shooting "the most extensive mass shooting in the nation's history." That can't be right. 

Did anyone on Editor Liz Houlton's news copy desk question the use of the words "mass" and "most extensive"?

If the Holocaust is a "mass" murder and the Armenian genocide is a "mass" killing, how can the murder of 12 people be called "mass"?

Unless this is typical newspaper hype. 

Hollywood crap

And shouldn't The Record and other media focus on how Hollywood spends obscene amounts of money churning out violent crap like the latest Batman movie?

Where are the movies about the people who own and edit newspapers?

Even such great newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post have employed editors and reporters who have simply made up stories and quotes under deadline pressure or in the pursuit of big journalism prizes.

Perversity of sports

For more laughs, take a look at another Page 1 story today on Pedophile State.

Leave it to the NCAA to put football in its place in State College, Pa., where the university has earned the title of Ped State, Penis State or Prick State.

When is The Record and other media going to put football and other sports where they belong -- in the Sports section?

Instead, the Woodland Park daily under Gottlieb and former Editor Francis "Frank" Scandale has glorified sports on the front page, ignoring the potential for abuse from all that male bonding.

More police news

In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, the big Hackensack news today is a terrific story about a woman who helped catch a suspect in her purse snatching after he returned to the scene of the crime (L-1).

But when Sykes virtually ignores municipal news from Hackensack in favor of police news and news about the former police chief, that's a real crime against readers.

Some readers wonder why a local obituary -- on a Clifton man who developed the first successful home treadmill -- didn't run on Page 1 in place of the Sally Ride obit (L-6).

 

Cats, dogs and just plain animals

Image via Wikipedia

The Penn State Lion Shrine. Students who rioted did a good imitation of wild animals.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

With dogs and cats on the front page today, cows on A-2 and a bunch of animals from Penn State on A-5, you could argue The Record's editors are inhuman.

You wouldn't get any push back from former newsroom employees whose lives were ruined by the mercurial Stephen A. Borg, Barbara Jaeger, Deirdre Sykes and  Francis "Frank" Scandale.

The Page 1 story on how "pets suffer in hard times" may pull many readers' heart strings, but others will wonder why the paper writes so little about how humans and Main Street businesses have fared during the recession.

Dog eat dog

Anyway, interim Editor Doug Clancy, aren't millions of unwanted pets destroyed every year in good times and bad? Why is this Page 1 news -- outside of you didn't have anything else?

The lead story today is another speculative one from Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher on how much money the state will save from high-deductible health plans for public workers.

But Clancy and the assignment desk should have known this story sounds just like the four or five earlier accounts she wrote about health-care and pension savings. 

Why not wait until the savings are realized and then report them?

For development

As usual, Staff Writer John Brennan comes down on the developer's side in another A-1 story today, this one about an expansion of the former Xanadu project into 5 acres of sensitive wetlands.

The Penn State story completely omits how a student protest turned into a riot after head coach Joe Paterno was fired last week in a child sex-abuse scandal. Who knows whether any of the students shown in an A-5 photo took part in the rock-throwing and other violence.

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section is filled with soft weekend news. 

Hackensack residents, among others, continue to wait for the end of a news drought.

Food fight

On the front of Better Living today, the highly promotional Starters column on recently opened restaurants is unusually long and carries a new byline, Joyce Venezia Suss (F-1).

It's hard to tell whether Suss knows anything about the origin of food from this sentence about an Irish pub:

"Ingredients are a particular source of pride and include certified Angus beef, hormone-free poultry and seasonal sustainable seafood ...."

Certified Angus Beef is nothing special; it is raised conventionally, with antibiotics and growth hormones. 

Federal law prohibits hormones in poultry, so it's possible the chicken and other poultry served at this pub were raised on antibiotics and animal byproducts. 

That doesn't sound like anything a restaurant owner would be proud of.