Does 'reform' get any more confusing?

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Coat of Arms of Jamaica.

The assignment editors at The Record have Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher tackling another Page 1 process story about changes in health-care coverage for public workers, leaving readers more confused than ever.

This is her fourth story this month on changes in health or pension benefits, which Editor Francis Scandale calls "reform," as he's been asked to do by Governor Christie's spin doctors.


Fletcher reports that next year's savings are projected to reach nearly $100 million, thanks to changes in federal law. Until now, she has cited this year's savings from changes in state law, putting them at $10 million.


More on Turkey


For the second day in a row, Scandale devotes most of the front page to the earthquake in Turkey, but today's local reaction story and map are far out of proportion to the death toll (A-1 and A-4).


Coverage of local Turks just reminds readers of how Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes have routinely ignored North Jersey's Jamaican-American community, which is far larger than the newer immigrant group.


The Record and NorthJersey.com even failed to report an historic change of government on the island, according to an Associated Press story on Salon.com:

KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Youthful lawmaker Andrew Holness was sworn in Sunday as Jamaica’s new prime minister, ushering in a government he said would heal political divisions, root out corruption, reduce debt and bureaucracy, and attract foreign investment to reduce poverty. 

Scandale, Sykes and their clueless minions can't get more out of touch with local residents than that. 


Page 1 typo


And Liz Houlton's crack news copy desk can't get any sloppier than missing a typo in the first word of the third front-page story today: "A environmental group...."


Why isn't the Obama administration's latest effort to curb home foreclosures on Page 1 today? Check L-7.


Locals yokels


The contempt for local readers continues in Sykes' Local section, which is missing municipal news from Hackensack, Teaneck and many other towns for yet another day.


For some reason, Teaneck reporter Andrea Alexander covered a Monday night meeting on city finances in Englewood. A house-fire photo was needed as filler on the same page, L-3.


For high rollers


In Better Living, free-lancer Bob Probert showers superlatives on Sear -- a new steakhouse in Closter with dinner entrees costing up to $60 -- but there's not a word on whether this pricey beef  is raised on harmful antibiotics and  growth hormones, and feed containing bits of dead animals (Starters, F-1).


Has Probert been told to confine his coverage to restaurants favored by multimillionaire Publisher Stephen A. "Beefeater" Borg? Where are stories about new restaurants with prices more suited to today's challenging economic climate?


Related articles

• Christie laughs off fat jokes (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Guess how much Christie weighs (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Andrew Holness sworn in as Jamaica's prime minister (guardian.co.uk)

Editorial is weeks overdue

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 Nearly four weeks after a massive earthquake hit Haiti, the editorial page of The Record of Woodland Park condemns "a vacuum of authority [that] is encouraging chaos and slowing the flow of supplies needed to prevent more deaths."

But this was evident weeks ago. Why did Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin finally turn away from preening in front of a mirror and focus on the humanitarian crisis in Haiti?

The editorial appears now, because the newspaper -- after much hesitation -- sent two staffers there, and several paragraphs on Page O-2 today are devoted to what they reported. Does The Record really care about Haiti or is it interested only in promoting its feeble news coverage?

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.

A good front, but not much else

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Staff writers have two compelling stories about North Jersey residents to relate on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but the rest of the paper is really thin and devoid of any meaningful local news.

The two, long Page 1 pieces report the rescue of a Teaneck woman from the rubble of a hotel in Haiti on Thursday (photo), two days after the quake, and the death of a Westwood soldier Afghanistan.

There is no explanation why the Teaneck story wasn't in the paper yesterday, a day after the rescue. The Westwood story "buries" the lead paragraph: "Westwood's heart was broken ...."

There was so little municipal news available yesterday, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and the other lazy, desperate and incompetent editors had to put a story on a hospital team leaving for Haiti on the front of the Local section, instead of in the A-section, where the rest of the quake news appears.

The rest of the section has "filler," but no stories about Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck or any of the other premier towns in Bergen County.

In Better Living, Food Editor Bill Pitcher puts on his recipe-editor's hat to give us a trio of preparations for marshmallows, calling them one of  "the season's prime ingredients." It's part of the food editor's ongoing effort to aid the obesity epidemic in North Jersey. Where is his editor, Barbara Jaeger, out to lunch?

More drivel from Columnist Mike Kelly

I'll post a critique of today's edition of The Record of Woodland Park later, but now I want to highlight the inane column from Mike Kelly on the front of the Local section.

Many people at the paper know Kelly has been floundering for years. Haven't the incompetent editors noticed he is unable to muster the requisite outrage of a columnist? Is his topic today -- the breakdown of cellphone and other communications with Haiti after a devastating earthquake -- even worthy of being printed?

Isn't there enough said on this same topic in the Page 1 news story about local Haitians that more than a dozen reporters contributed to?

"But now, suddenly, a small part of our world has gone dead," Kelly writes. Sadly, Kelly went dead long ago.

With images of children sleeping among the dead in Haiti, is this the best Kelly can do? What about writing how the world has ignored Haiti, allowing it to spiral into misery with a corrupt, dysfunctional government and a greedy ruling class? Why not question why aid wasn't rushed there from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- only a few hundred miles away -- rather than from Virginia and California?

Of course, this is a much bigger natural disaster than Hurricane Katrina, but did it occur to Kelly to write about how the U.S. response was far more immediate for Haitians than for the residents of New Orleans?