Image via WikipediaYou can understand why approval of a medical marijuana bill dominates the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but why is former sports reporter John Brennan given Page 1 play for another, wildly sympathetic portrait of ex-Nets basketball player Jayson Williams?
Brennan -- who would make a good P.R. man for Williams -- again goes out of his way to hide the man's problems with alcohol, omitting any mention of the night of drinking in 2002 that preceded the fatal shooting of his driver, whose life was cut short at 55. I can't wait until Williams is in prison for his stupidity in showing off his loaded shotgun to friends.
The Williams story on A-1 forces the lazy, incompetent editors to give short shrift to passage of a land-use bill that is being portrayed by environmentalists as a giveaway to developers, shoving it inside to Page A-4.
Don't look for any municipal, education or developement news of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood or many other Bergen County towns in the Local section of the former Hackensack daily. But what is increasingly passing for local news takes up all of L-3 -- court, crime, accident and fire news -- and more of it appears on L-1 and L-2. You have to wonder what Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, the editor who heads the local assignement desk, is doing to earn her inflated salary.
But Hackensack residents, who live under the noisy flight paths of both Teterboro and Newark airports, and people in other towns inadvertently get good news in the Business section. Word that Teterboro flights and employment are falling mean less noise and a slightly better quality of life for tens of thousands of us. It's an issue the former Bergen Record and its reporters long have ignored. (Malcolm A. Borg, the bored chairman of North Jersey Media Group, was a powerful, vocal advocate for an air museum at Teterboro in the mid-1980s. Now, all he and his children -- Publisher Stephen A. Borg and General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg -- do is count their money after downsizing The Record and cutting retiree medical benefits.)
I'm sure I speak for many who would like to see Teterboro serve only as a sales, training and maintenance hub, with virtually all flights shifted to other airports. After all, this is not essential aviation, but merely business executives, actors and hip-hop stars whose pampered behinds are transported in private jets. Maybe the rest of us would get more sleep.
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Great Hackensack news in the business section today, under the "Start-ups" banner: A new bail bonds company has opened! I'm sure Stephen and Jennifer have a special someone they would like to see avail its services. I'm surprised your headline was pegged toward the Jayson Williams story and not the medical marijuana bill, since you could have written: "What are they smoking?" P.S. Go easy on the Jets coverage in the next few days, it's going to be on Page 1 and they do have a big following in Bergen County.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your insight and suggestions, Aaron.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, just another example of sloppy editing -- the bail bonds story noted that the company paid search engines for top placement. First off, you don't pay the search engines for the placement, you pay search engine optimization companies to get you better placement. Second, when I googled "bail bonds Hackensack," the company was nowhere to be found ... except for three or four places down, there was a link to the Record story! But never mind the empty headed assignment editor, I can remember when any conscientious copy editor would have checked the search engine ranking and sent the story back to the editor or writer for reworking. A former colleague who was laid off last summer told me most of the current copy editors, especially the ones who came over from the Herald News, spend half their time surfing the Internet. I was guilty of the same offense, but at least the other half of the time I was productive as hell.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Yes, I was just thinking this morning how we watched the Daily Show and Letterman every night in the newsroom because the ridiculous early deadlines left us with no work to do for up to two hours at the end of our copy desk shift. Now, I wouldn't waste my time watching Leno, Conan or any of those other morons.
ReplyDeleteMr. Elson, you can pay search engine companies for "visibility," but perhaps not for ranking. Visibility might mean placement in the sponsored set of links that show at the top of the results page, or in the right column. Most users don't know the difference. That's visibility and that's for sale. But if Mr. Catanzaro IS paying for such services, he's not getting a lot for his investment - you're right about that. My point being that the story's claim is accurate due to use of the word "visibility," not "ranking."
ReplyDeleteRight you are, Anonymous, but there were two or three paid ads at the top and I forget how many adword ads on the side, and none of them were from the firm the article was about. I only checked google, mind you, he may have been using Yahoo or another engine. And google ads don't show up every time.
ReplyDeleteI traipsed around Yahoo, MSN, Google and AOL, using several variations on your keywords. The bail bonds Internet site in question never came up on the first page. But the issue at hand here was whether or not the article in The Bergen Record was accurate in stating that Catanzaro paid for visibility, which it probably is. I agree, however, that it would be erroneous to say that Catanzaro actually got the visibility he paid for. He obviously did not. Perhaps I'm splitting hairs, but I see that as a necessary part of the job you once did. Vuala.
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