Let's hear the voice of the people

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People often achieve far more eloquence than many journalists can muster, but newspapers like The Record of Woodland Park don't give enough voice to them, as today's paper shows.

Nearly a week after the quake struck Haiti, a wire service reporter finally quotes a 71-year-old woman who goes to the heart of the matter: "The government is a joke," the dying woman says in a Page 1 story. "The U.N. is a joke." Buried inside Better Living today, on Page F-3, North Jersey residents are asked who ages faster, men or women? The discussion is revealing, and should been have displayed far more prominently. One man said: "Men! Because of women."

But what does The Record give us? Tired editorial writers, columnists such as Mike Kelly, John Cichowski and Bill Ervolino, and front-page coverage of sports. Ervolino today shows what he does best, his "Real Jersey" series, where he returns to his role as a reporter at North Jersey locales and draws people out on age and other questions. I would have been far more interested in seeing that on the front page than coverage of the Jets playoff chances.

Continuing coverage of Haiti and a staff-written piece on the race debate in North Jersey takes up the rest of Page 1 -- serving as a counterpoint to the diminishing amount of local news about communities such as Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, among the most diverse in The Record's circulation area.

This is, after all, the paper that got rid of its only black columnist and its only Hispanic columnist. This is, after all, the paper that devoted hundreds of hours of staff time to series on drug dealing and prostitution in Paterson, and now runs numerous stories about the Silk City's municipal affairs in its single daily edition, because its Bergen staff of lazy, incompetent assignment editors, such as Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, and its reporters produce so little news.

Haiti coverage in The Record has avoided any mention of the hundreds of Cuban doctors who were working in the impoverished nation before the quake hit or the aid the communist government sent since the disaster. This is what you'd expect from a paper that used to assign Castro-hating Cuban exiles to cover its occasional story about the Caribbean's biggest island, ignoring moderate views among the large number of exiles in North Jersey.

Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale always defended the paper's slanted coverage of  the island. Was it because the newsroom had so few Spanish-speaking staffers or because he was hen-pecked by his Cuban wife?

And do we need the two long, detailed, staff-written stories on A-8 today about North Jerseyans who were in  Haiti and returned home safely? A few paragraphs on each would have sufficed.