Editors no speaky Spanish

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Many families in Guatemala are supported by illegal immigrants in North Jersey.

What do you do when a Guatemalan immigrant is killed in Passaic and apparently the only reporter you have who speaks Spanish covers the city of Hackensack?

"Screw Hackensack," Editors Francis Scandale and Deirdre Sykes of The Record said in unison at the Tuesday morning news conference in Woodland Park, dispatching Monsy Alvarado to report and write today's heart-rending story at the bottom of Page 1.


Alvarado, however, seemed intent on not telling readers right away that victim Antonio Chiroy entered the country illegally, and the story never actually uses the phrase "illegal immigrant." 


Was that an oversight by Alvarado's clueless assignment editor or Liz Houlton's news copy desk? The copy desk also uses "SLAYING" as a jump word on A-1, but the jump head on A-6 says "BEATING."


Stories about illegal immigrants who support families in Mexico, Guatemala and other countries are few and far between in The Record, and it's clear that to get in the paper today, Chiroy had to be murdered.


In white news ...


Of course, the big front-page news today is aimed at the paper's favorite demographic -- the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly wealthy residents of Ridgewood.


Judging by the coverage of protesters, you'd think expansion of The Valley Hospital is a project akin to the Hoover Dam. The editors are clearly on the side of opponents.


Just look at the drop headline on A-1:

Hospital expansion could change face of village

That's  so exaggerated, it's laughable. 


The hospital's "expansion" plan is confined to its current campus, and doesn't require the taking of more land -- though you won't find that in today's story by Staff Writer Mary Jo Layton. 


That's rich


In the third A-1 story today, Rep. Leonard Lance, R-Clinton, calls for rejection of tax-deduction caps in President Obama's jobs bill -- tax increases that would affect individuals making more than $200,000 a year or couples making more than $250,000.


Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson actually quotes Lance as saying the tax hikes "will hurt, not help, the Garden State's struggling economy." 


But are wealthy residents the ones who are struggling?


Local yokels


Sykes' Local sections today and Tuesday contain little local news.


The lead story on L-1 Tuesday was a preview of today's A-1 report on the Ridgewood hospital-plan hearing.


A huge chunk of Tuesday's Local front is taken up by another No-One-Was-Injured photo, this one showing a truck fire on Route 17 in Paramus.


On Tuesday's front page, Scandale continued to turn his back on his staff by running a photo from Kenya -- rather than an image of life in North Jersey.


Fortress mentality


The big error in big type at the top of Monday's front page -- the headline over the unveiling of the 9/11 memorial on Sunday -- was never corrected, just as the editors ignored their confusion in two Page 1 stories recently between the borough of Point Pleasant and Point Pleasant Beach.

Sorrow etched in stone

Of course, the only problem is the names of 9/11 victims are etched in bronze. Who screwed that up?


Name game


Monday's paper also raised a question that was never answered -- what do we call the World Trade Center site destroyed a decade ago?


In Monday's paper, there are references in headlines, captions and text to "trade center memorial," "Ground Zero," "reborn World Trade Center site," "9/11 Memorial Plaza," and "new 9/11 Memorial Plaza" -- and that's just on the front page.


An A-6 photo caption on Monday called the reflecting pools the "National September 11 Memorial." Monday's New York Times continued to refer to a lower-case "ground zero."

'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.

Good to see on-the-ball reporting

Image by rustytanton via Flickr

The lead story on the front of The Record of Woodland Park today isn't just another routine recitation of storm damage you usually find in the paper. This report says the nor'easter felled a tree that killed two Teaneck pedestrians on Saturday in an accident many people fear.

But there is real detail here: The victims appear to have been returning from synagogue services, so their orthodoxy prevented them from driving and exposed them to the dangers of such a wind-driven storm. You don't see this kind of on-the-ball reporting in the former Hackensack daily every day, hampered as it is by a clueless assignment desk under Deirdre Sykes. 

The rest of Page 1 carries another substantial take-out on the deficit-ridden state pension system by Staff Writers Elise Young and Dave Sheingold, who have been following this story for months. It seems Christie Whitman, the former Republican governor, is at the root of today's problems.

Unlike Young and Sheingold, Columnist John Cichowski is late to the debate -- this one over the sorry state of mass transit in North Jersey. On the front of Local, The Road Warrior finally has one the few columns he's written in more than six years on long-suffering bus riders, who now face 25% fare hikes and service cuts -- and he still refuses to check out such decrepit local buses as the 780 that runs from Englewood to Hackensack and Passaic city.

Cichowski's column fleshes out the lead Opinion piece by Zoe Baldwin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. She writes that drivers should shoulder more of the state's fiscal burden -- an argument that hasn't been adopted by the paper's editorial writers, who, like Cichowski, appear to be held hostage by motorists.

If you want to throw up, try to get through Mike Kelly's column on the Opinion front about Ground Zero. Read this, for example:

"Ground Zero and all its shadowy issues have become like a ghost in a Shakespearean drama that just can't seem to find its bearings. All Ground Zero needs to become an even greater tragedy is the modern equivalent of ancient Rome's Marcus Brutus."

Help! I can't read more. I have to go to the bathroom and barf.