More sloppy work by the copy desk

Image via Wikipedia

The Hackensack River, as seen from Teaneck.

Residents get tax break

This main headline on the lead story in The Record today promises readers way too much: Your home being reassessed is no guarantee your property  taxes will be cut.

Just below that story, the photo overline is: 

A DAY OF APPRECIATION FOR VIETNAM SOLDIERS

You mean for those communists? No. The phrase is "VIETNAM VETERANS."

Editor Francis Scandale sent a reporter and photographer all the way to Holmdel for this story, but the photographer didn't do her job. 

Sure, she got a photo of a River Vale veteran receiving a medal, but the caption says it was awarded "an unidentified man." What a hoot. This is Page 1 journalism?

Out to lunch again

Page A-2 carries a second correction from a story last Tuesday in the accuracy-challenged Better Living section.

The first correction on Thursday fixed a wrong address for a store in Pompton Lakes. Today's correction fixes a wrong telephone number for a Teaneck store. Way to go, Features Director Barbara Jaeger.

This editor apparently has never told her feature copy editors to dial every number included in a story to ensure its accuracy. Instead, they dial only for lousy Chinese takeout.

Last week's gushing, promotional A-1 story on a developer who plans to finish the Xanadu project by Staff Writer John Brennan has produced a big dividend for the paper: A full-page ad on A-10 today.

More horses' asses

The best news head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes could find for the front of today's Local section is the resumption of harness racing. 

Gambling and abusing animals? That's local news?

Sykes and Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado have made covering Hackensack news a long shot, but Alvarado rushed down to The Meadowlands Racetrack for this overblown story.

Dead wood

AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH! Another column by Road Warrrior John Cichowski about parking tickets (L-1). Another column by Mike Kelly about 9/11 (O-1).

Also on O-1, the jump line on Carl Golden's column is wrong, which might be a good thing, because the former GOP gubernatorial mouthpiece glosses over his pal, Governor Christie, having engineered the loss of both minority justices on the state Supreme Court.

Fat of the land

Celebrity endorsements have nothing to do with the concerns of restaurant goers, so why is Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung wasting readers time with today's "Corner Table" column (F-7)?

Does Ung ever wonder why her precious column ends up in the back of Sunday's Better Living section?

Who is harness racing's rabbi?

Image by grover webb via Flickr

Does Editor Francis Scandale love going to the track? How about Staff Writer John Brennan, whose sentences rattle, roll and ramble? I know Local News Editor Jim "Corny" Cornelius and News Copy Desk Slot Vinny Byrne love the horses, but those two have no pull with Scandale.

Harness racing leads The Record of Woodland Park again today, as if racing rabbis Scandale and Brennan think readers are sitting on the edge of their seats for word of its fate. And the fate of New Jersey Network -- the only in-state source of televised Jersey news -- is relegated to Page A-3, again, instead of making the front page.

The headlines on the main, A-1 element fail to communicate immediately how violent a suspected purse snatcher allegedly was and the lead paragraph fails to clearly state bags were snatched from a moving SUV. The phrase "purse snatcher on wheels" would have worked well in the headline and the lead, but it doesn't appear until the continuation page, A-8.

Chief withholds report

In Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Staff Writer Joseph Ax continue to allow Teaneck Police Chief Robert Wilson to manage release of information on the death of Officer John Abraham nearly two months after he died in his police cruiser, which went violently out of control and slammed sideways into a telephone pole across from headquarters (L-3).

Abraham wasn't wearing a seat belt in his Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor -- a car with a long history of safety problems -- but Wilson refused to release a copy of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office accident report or the autopsy results.

Blast from the past

For a change, there is a lot of local news in Local today, but of particular interest on L-3 is the byline of Staff Writer Joseph Gemignani. He wrote a story about how Tenafly was in the early 1900s, when residents in the rural village raised animals and grew their own food. 

(That was long before Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who lives in a $3.65 million Tenafly mansion he bought with a company mortgage, folded the Food section.)

In the mid- to late 1980s, the veteran journalist worked at night in the Hackensack newsroom in the menial job of layout editor. When Gemignani wasn't at his desk drawing lines on his layout sheets, he could be seen at the copying machine -- his face expressionless, his life draining away -- the embodiment of the paper's age-discrimination policy.

Gemignani spent more than 15 years at The New York Times before returning to what is now North Jersey Media Group. It's not known whether Gemignani is on The Record staff or working at one of NJMG's many weeklies.