Lazy editors lose directions to city

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The Record refuses to send reporters to Zuccotti Park, shown before it was occupied.

The Record's assignment editors didn't want to send reporters to lower Manhattan to interview North Jersey residents taking part in the Occupy Wall Street protests.


So the lazy bums concocted a ridiculous story for the Local front today that would for the first time since mid-September try to gauge whether the occupation of Zuccotti Park "made any ripples across the Hudson River."


What a joke. What did they expect? Students skipping classes at Bergen Community College in Paramus? Books long overdue at the Wayne library? Depositors withdrawing all their money from Bank of America branches?


Editorial gas


Who was responsible for this slanted, poorly reported story -- head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes; her deputy, Dan Sforza; or clueless Rich Whitby? Maybe Assistant Assignment Editor Christina Joseph was on weekend doody.


In their North Jersey wanderings on the Occupy Wall Street story, Staff Writers John  C. Ensslin and Andrea Alexander apparently didn't try to find -- or want to find -- such North Jersey residents as James Martin of Ringwood.


Martin, whose office is a few blocks away from Zuccotti Park, has a great deal to say about what he learned from the protesters on O-2, the editorial page.


Martin puts to shame all those print and electronic reporters who have complained repeatedly the protest has no focused message. That's just grousing from lazy journalists who have been spoiled by having every other  story handed to them in the form of a press release.  


News scramble


There isn't much to read on Editor Francis Scandale's Page 1 today. I found it so boring, I stopped to unload a dishwasher, even though I had plenty of clean plates, cups, forks and so forth.


Editor Liz Houlton's news copy desk guaranteed readers would be instantly turned off by the main element on A-1 today by putting the year 2001 in the main headline.


The takeout on how New Jersey supposedly led the way in probing the decade-old anthrax attack comes five days after a "Frontline" investigation aired on PBS.


The off-lead story is another discussion of cutbacks in health benefits for current and retired state workers, the third or fourth piece recently on a similar subject by Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher.


Blame the victims


In the third front-page story, transportation reporter Karen Rouse continues to trumpet NJ Transit's company line that pedestrians killed by trains are "trespassers."


She has yet to report on the success or failure of lawsuits filed by victims' families against the state transit agency. Do juries believe the agency has been negligent by failing to post guards at all crossings and build fences along unprotected stretches of tracks in Hackensack and other towns?


Back on L-1, Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski retreats to a comfortable subject -- MVC computers -- ensuring he didn't have to stray far from his own computer.


On L-2, Staff Writer Melissa Hayes reports on what's been done to repair the "bad reputations" of Englewood's middle and high schools -- her first extensive education story since she took over the beat in May.


The story updates desegregation efforts at Dwight Morrow High, but doesn't mention that few white students attend Janis E. Dismus Middle School -- a tradition dating to when Publisher Stephen A. Borg attended a private school in Englewood.


Locals are yokels


Hackensack residents -- as well as readers in many other towns -- won't find any municipal news today.


Scandale must have been blinded by his love for readers in their 20s not to realize an expected increase in Social Security benefits this week should have been on Page 1 today, not B-1.


I'm sure readers also are having a hard time fathoming why a glowing profile of the CEO and president of Becton, Dickinson and Co. appears on the Business front today. 


He must be well-compensated, though the story omits any mention of his pay and perks. Still, B-1 and B-6 photos of Vincent A. Fortenza clearly show his clothes don't fit him.


Freeloader's complaints


On the Better Living front today, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung passes along her pet peeves, as well as those from her co-workers. And is that photo above the headline an actual waitress or a clumsy attempt to smear servers with a posed studio shot?


Readers' biggest pet peeve is Ung, a restaurant reviewer on an expense account who is blind to how restaurants mark up bottles of wine 500% or more to boost their profits or price entrees higher than at comparable places in the city.


It's not her money, so she gladly pays through the nose for meat and poultry that are raised with harmful additives, and for artificially colored farmed salmon.


God forbid, she would ask a restaurant owner to tell her how the food was raised or grown and pass that along to readers so they can make an intelligent decision on whether they want to eat there.

Editors have an eye for young women

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A Better Living cover story has a hole big
enough to drive a milk truck through.

The Record's most dramatic photos from coverage of Tropical Storm Irene show rescues from floods, but why did an attractive young woman land on Page 1 while the best an octogenarian could do was the front of Local?


Critics say Editor Francis Scandale, Assistant Assignment Editor Rich Whitby and others have an eye for young women -- and it shows in today's coverage.


To cover the storm on Sunday, Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes had less than half the number of reporters they threw at the recent earthquake, plus a handful of photographers and an unknown number of assignment, copy and layout editors.


Fifteen reporters are listed as contributing to the storm report, and they turned in an impressive amount of copy. 


Keystone Kopy Editors


But Liz Houlton continues to resist sending her news copy editors to boot camp for writing photo captions, and a couple I saw are embarrassing, to say the least. 


On Page A-4 today, the photo caption says, "Three men navigating a boat...." But it's clear from the photo one man is pulling the boat by a rope, a second is bailing water leaking into it and the third is smiling for the photographer.


On L-6, a photo shows two men in the foreground looking at a tractor-trailer partially submerged in flood water in front of Costco Wholesale in Hackensack. Why does the caption call them "spectators"?


Readers angry at the lack of local news coverage in North Jersey can relate to the residents of Fresno,Calif., where no media covered a Board of Education meeting at which the superintendent decided to give back $800,000 in compensation to the schools (A-8).


The Record didn't attempt to localize the story, and ask North Jersey school superintendents if they intend to do the same thing.


Spoiled reporters


As with past storm coverage, the paper says it will take up to a week to restore power to homes and businesses (L-1). 


But the stories  never explain why. Are the utilities short on staff? Why don't they hire more people to help ease the recession? And where are the reports of supermarkets and restaurants throwing out spoiled food?


Better Living's cover story on milk alternatives lists the nutritional contents of soy, almond, rice and other substitutes, but not cow's milk, so how are readers supposed to make an intelligent choice (F-1)?

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Editors ignore people Christie screwed

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Editor Francis Scandale has portrayed Silk City as Sin City, where drugs and prostitution have corrupted scores of Bergen County suburbanites.


 

When is the last time The Record ran an interview with advocates for abused children or the parents of a child denied an after-school program?

Have you seen anything on women whose grandmothers are in nursing homes facing $29 million in cuts proposed by Governor Christie? 


What about the views of low-income parents whose children no longer get a nutritious, state-subsidized breakfast at school?


Sixteen days into the state's new fiscal year, Editors Francis Scandale and the clueless assignment editors working under Deirdre Sykes don't care about any of those people or the thousands of others suffering under Christie's mean-spirited budget.


What do you want from them? They never talk to readers, just sit in the office all day long, eat lunch and move their bowels. 


Hey, they're journalists at a once-great suburban daily. Do you really expect them to send reporters out to measure all the pain the GOP bully of a governor has inflicted and put it into words?


But someone is giving a voice to Christie's victims.


You can read all about the cuts in the letters to the editor that keep on pouring in, such as the three on Page A-11 today from Dianne Douthat of Wayne, Duane Ross of Waldwick and Jessica Cheng of Cranbury under the heading:

Series of attacks

on N.J.'s poor

Kudos to Letters Editor Charles Saydah, a lifer, for printing these letters and others. Keep them coming.


Of course, printing letters from readers doesn't fulfill the responsibility of Scandale, Sykes, Dan Sforza, Christina Joseph, Rich Whitby and other editors to bring the budget cuts to life.


Page 1 sleeper


What do readers get instead?


The lead Page 1 story reports more mea culpas from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who lost two loyal editors in the growing phone-hacking scandal.


I wonder how much soul-searching is going on at The Record's Woodland Park headquarters among Scandale, Sykes and their minions for all the questionable tactics they've employed?


Look at that deadly dull, bureaucratic process story on curbing the state's nearly 600 local authorities, boards and commissions at the bottom of A-1. 


The third paragraph begins, "It will be a year from now and likely much longer before the authorities, board and commissions must upgrade their online transparency ...." 


OK. They spend $5 billion annually, but why is this snoozer on A-1?


More 'woops'


Page A-2 has the second correction in a row on a Paterson story, though this one is labeled a "clarification."


Someone should clarify how everybody missed a typo in the A-1 photo caption with the soccer story. "In" appears instead of "is."


Sykes' Local section is filled today with Law & Order copy ad naseum, including yet another study of two towns merging their police departments and a plan to have the superfluous Bergen County police patrol three towns.


Twelve precious inches on L-2 are wasted on a stolen landscape truck with fake plates in Oradell. Why isn't this a brief?

Marc Schwarz


On Page F-2 of Better Living, Marc Schwarz is listed in the Contact Us box without a title above his name -- a change from when he was listed as assistant features editor under Features Editor Barbara Jaeger, who was shown the door earlier this month.


Is he the new features editor?

Let's hope minority judge was packing heat

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Did Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor need a visa to visit New Jersey?

On her trip to New Jersey, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor must have brought a couple of bodyguards with her to ward off any attempt by Governor Christie to bounce the minority woman off the U.S. Supreme Court.

With all due respect, does her trite advice to Ramapo College graduates really deserve Page 1 play in The Record of Woodland Park today -- or did Editor Francis Scandale and his staff skip out Friday for a long weekend?

Is the college's president a quick-change artist? The A-1 and A-6 photos show Sotomayor with two different men -- one clean-shaven, one bearded -- but both captions identify him as Ramapo President Peter Mercer (he's the one on the front).

And don't you hate it when a photo shows someone laughing and doesn't explain why, as in the A-1 photos today and Friday? 

Contempt of court

Talk about justice delayed. Look at that contemptuous businessman in the photo at the bottom of A-1. He's defied attempts to clean up his Wayne dump site for more than 25 years. 

This is the kind of failure -- of government, the courts and the media -- that should lead the paper, not commencement speeches.

 Local yokels

A letter to the editor from Katherine Restaino Dick of Teaneck praises recently departed dress shop owner Lois Schulman, a merchant who cared about Cedar Lane and her customers (A-13).

The letter makes you wonder why The Record's municipal staff hasn't reported anything about Cedar Lane for several years.

In a story on "sexual enhancement" pills sold under the brand name Erection MD, Staff Writer Kibret Markos actually uses the phrase "without any hard evidence" (L-1).

Poor prospect for news

If you live in one of those Prospect Avenue high-rises in Hackensack, the only way to get coverage is to make sure your parking garage collapses (L-3).

Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado has completely ignored all the noise generated by ambulance sirens since Hackensack University Medical Center took over the service from the city Fire Department a couple of years ago.

Nor has she ever reported on the plight of high-rise residents who can't use their terraces in good weather, because of noise from business jets that seem to scrape rooftops as they head for Teterboro Airport.

Thanks goes out to head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her minions, including Dan Sforza and Rich Whitby, for another great Local section.

 

No escaping editors' laziness

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Since Saturday, The Record has carried only one story about Japanese residents of North Jersey.

You can hear the snoring above all that laughter from head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and the pounding of the keyboard by sub-assignment editor Rich Whitby, assuming they aren't contributing to The Record's newsroom snooze fest.

You also can hear snoring from the office of Editor Francis Scandale, who quickly ran out of ideas for covering the disaster in Japan through the eyes of North Jersey residents who might have relatives or friends living there.

You know the editors are lazy by all the junk in the Woodland Park daily today -- filling the space of legitimate stories they didn't generate.

Wire-story filler

On Page A-11 -- opposite a full jump page on the earthquake and tsunami -- more than a quarter of a page is wasted on a floating restaurant that was moved back to shore in Kentucky -- with no injuries and no starvation.

In Sykes' Local section, nearly a third of L-3 is devoted to Lyndhurst news -- an exercise class and a single restaurant being allowed to have outdoor tables. The lead paragraph of the fitness piece will put you to sleep.

Editor covers hometown

More filler appears on L-6: A doctor is honored for his service on the Health Board in Sykes' hometown.

Now, take a look at the messy story leading Local today (L-1). The reporter gets the official run-around on the identity of a Fort Lee fire victim -- no name, no sex and no age appear in the story -- but the headline on the continuation page says, "Woman dies."

That reminds me of what a lousy job the paper did on Sunday in reporting the death of Robert Ellis, 48, in a shootout with police early Saturday in Washington Township. There's not a single word of follow-up in today's paper.

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Shame on Scandale

Scandale is especially insensitive. He had a couple of heart-to-heart talks with News Copy Editor Michael Thaler before he died of cancer in 2008, and was well aware the copy editor had spent three transformational years teaching English at a junior high in Japan.

Does it occur to Scandale there might be other North Jersey residents living in Japan and teaching English now?  Do their families know where they are or even if they are alive? Does Scandale care? Can someone check if he's napping in his chair.

Sleepy assignment desk

Why aren't reporters sent to the airport, the Japanese-American Society in Fort Lee or the big Japanese supermarket in Edgewater to interview Japanese residents about their search for relatives in their homeland?

Television coverage of the disaster is putting the paper to shame. The Today Show located an American woman teaching English in Japan and connected her by cellphone to her relatives back home.

Coverage this morning also showed a Japanese couple finding the family dog in a tsunami-devastated neighborhood, and other residents recovering photo albums from the wreckage of their home -- all of which readers can relate to.

Green with mold

On Sunday, Columnist Mike Kelly defended Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who held a hearing on Islamic terrorists even as the congressman deflected any focus on his own support for the Irish Republican Army.

Today, Kelly is back with a long column on Englewood officials' quixotic bid to collect taxes on the East Hill mansion that has been owned by the Libyan government since late 1982 (L-1). 

In the process, Kelly gives more publicity to Schmuley Boteach, a rabbi and author who bought the house next door, knowing full well who lived there, but who has cried bloody murder ever since.

It apparently doesn't bother Kelly that Englewood appears to be doing little to improve the education of black and Hispanic children -- 99% of the enrollment -- in its public elementary and middle schools.

Or that city officials decided it was "too expensive" to convert the shuttered Lincoln Elementary School -- a 100-year-old building in a working-class neighborhood near downtown -- into a community center.

Hackensack readers still haven't seen any stories about budget deliberations or the tax rate from reporter Monsy Alvarado, although those meetings have been reported by other municipal reporters in Teaneck (L-1 today) and other towns.

Two-faced Christie

The lead story on A-1 today is another example of Governor Christie trying to score points with his conservative supporters across the country, while desperately accepting cash from anywhere he can get it to avoid taxing millionaires.

The state has already received $39 million and is asking for another $40 million under the new federal health insurance law he has denounced as "Obamacare," Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson reports.

A second look

The same quarter-page story on the NCAA pool appeared on opposite pages Sunday in the four-page Wall Street Journal insert carried by The Record Business section (B-4 and B-5).

'Bergen Beat' or beating Bergen?

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The Web site of The Record and other publications of North Jersey Media Group now has a blog about Bergen County. 

I don't know how much of the information reporters post at northjersey.com appears in the Woodland Park daily. Here is an editor's note on the blog:

Bergen Beat

Welcome to Bergen Beat, a place where reporters from The Record will post information from the towns they cover and insights from the streets of Bergen County. We hope that you will take some time and interact with the reporters who cover your world.

Daniel Sforza
Assistant Director of Assignment/Bergen

Posted by Dan Sforza on 01/04 at 06:44 PM
(0) Comments • Permalink

You would think "insights from the streets" would show up in the paper. And I take exception to Sforza saying "reporters who cover your world," because that is so far from the truth.

Sforza is a former reporter who covered transportation and Englewood before that, but he was no great shakes.

On the Englewood beat, he apparently wasn't aware that an open-air police firing range awakened residents with gunshots and shotgun blasts as early as 8 a.m. more than 100 days each year. 

When he covered transportation, he ignored defective NJ Transit cruiser buses on commuter routes to Manhattan, and wrote stories about the "highway of the future."

Sforza works under head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, a former weekly newspaper reporter who has been at the paper forever in one guise or another.

Local news coverage has diminished in direct proportion to their inability -- and the inability of other assistant assignment editors -- to send reporters out to cover stories that have meaning to readers in Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other communities.

The assignment editors are supposed to keep abreast of the news. Instead, at least one of them, Rich Whitby, merely stares at breasts in the newsroom.

Bergen Beat