How much a single reporter can do

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Staff Writer Colleen Diskin is showing editors and staffers at The Record of Woodland Park what one professional journalist can do -- in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of dollars and years squandered by reporters working for head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes.


Diskin once worked for Sykes, but when the reporter's Mother Load column was moved to the features section, she presumably was transferred to that department and the supervision of Features Director Barbara Jaeger. Diskin's last column ran in February, so I don't know whether she has remained in Features.


Now, she has reported and written a five-part series on youth baseball that began Sunday. This is not a subject that interests me -- and five parts may be two too many -- but it is reported and written so well that it stands in stark contrast to the drivel turned out by the so-called investigative reporters supervised by Sykes on stories about Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa and his onetime chief of detectives, Michael Mordaga.

After nearly three years and the expenditure of an estimated $500,000 in staff salaries, a team of reporters lead by Staff Writer Jean Rimbach -- working under the micromanaging Sykes -- published a single article about Mordaga that was so pathetically weak no editor had the nerve to run it on Page 1. Mordaga's name wasn't even in the lead paragraph, and the story ran in December on the Local front.


Sykes sidetracked Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado on the Mordaga vendetta for so long, Alvarado completely neglected her Hackensack beat. I sent an e-mail to Publisher Stephen A. Borg in the first half of 2008, notifying him no story about the city had run for more than a year. Since June 2009, still under Sykes' thumb, Alvarado has written virtually no story about Hackensack except those involving Police Chief Ken Zisa, who has been arrested twice and suspended without pay.

Alvarado has yet to report on the city's proposed budget and tax hike, leaving that to The Hackensack Chronicle, another North Jersey Media Group publication. This is what the Borgs call "responsible journalism."

There is no Hackensack, Englewood or Teaneck news in Local today, but the section keeps on printing story after story about the battle against expansion of The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood and that parcel near the GWB bridge that has been vacant for decades.


The front of Local places two elements next to each other: Mike Kelly's column on the ridiculous people protesting a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, and a "Newstracker" on that imam who has been fighting deportation. I guess it's the anti-Muslim edition. 



The paper's two buffoons -- Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin and Bill Ervolino -- have columns today. 

Instead of calling Governor Christie's refusal to reappoint Justice John Wallace the racist act it is, Doblin makes light of it by invoking the Supremes singing group. Ervolino, in a piece on Nouri's, a great Middle Eastern market in Paterson, can't resist putting the spotlight on himself and his lame attempts at humor about unfamiliar food, yet manages to overlook all the terrific, fresh-baked Syrian and Turkish bread sold there. 


Diskin is just the kind of reporter who would do a wonderful job on the obesity epidemic, especially as it affects children, a subject The Record, Food Editor Bill Pitcher, Sykes and other editors  refuse to pay special attention to -- maybe because it would force some of them into an uncomfortable examination of their own eating habits.