An unbending front-page rule

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It's been one of the most inflexible rules at The Record for decades: The most prominent story on the front page must have a good, color photo anchoring it. The desperate, incompetent editors once referred to this as "the patch," and it came into being after the former Hackensack daily installed color presses in the 1980s.

The Woodland Park-based paper actually has a graphics editor -- not a news editor -- laying out the front page and determining the play of stories.

Today is a perfect example of how this rule has served the paper poorly and cheated readers. How can The Record be taken seriously when football or some other nonsense keeps real news off of the front page? Health-care reform and the state's growing deficit get Page 1 play today, but the Rev. Jesse Jackson's attack on the nation's greedy banks doesn't (photo).

In the Local section today, there is news of Paterson and the Passaic County prosecutor, but nothing about Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood, the three most diverse towns in Bergen County. The continuing lack of local news may be why the editors moved the non-profit news page into the Monday Local section from the Business section last year.

Elsewhere, a Business page story by Staff Writer Carol Fletcher on law firms raising their hourly rates omits any examples of the new rates, likely $400 or more an hour at the biggest firms. Next to it, a story on small businesses denied loans by banks (remember the Rev. Jesse Jackson?) shows a business owner in Fort Worth, Texas, not North Jersey.

In Better Living, the better part of two pages is taken up by a story on the electrician who changes the color of the lights at the Empire State Building. Only the talent of the reporter assigned to it, Sachi Fujmori, saves it from being just filler. The electrician is from Paramus, but that is no excuse to devote so much precious space to him.