"Castrato" fires another blank

Image by asterix611 via Flickr










If Frank "Castrato" Scandale wants to devote half of the front page to the first football game at the new Meadowlands stadium, no one can dissuade The Record's high-fiving, ass-slapping, jock-itching editor, who feels more comfortable in a locker room than in a newsroom. His mantra: "Business of sports. It's not sports, it's the business of sports."


But there's other business he doesn't attend to, not the least of which is finding a reporter who is at the top of his game and worthy of front-page play. Staff Writer John Brennan isn't that reporter, as he's shown so many times in the past, and as he demonstrates today with his clunky story on long-suffering Jets fans finally coming home to a venue with the team's name on it. 


Look at this veteran reporter's pedestrian lead paragraph, where he compares the fans to tenants in a building. Instead of hooking readers, this lead sends them packing. It doesn't even make sense:

"Jets fans have never been the primary tenant in any building where they've played in their 50-year history."

It's the team -- not the fans -- who are the so-called tenants. Who does "they've played" refer to? Fans don't play, the team does. This Brennan buffoon is referred to as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in his new sports business blog. What a smear on the Pulitzer Prizes. This guy gets the Palooka Prize.
 
The rest of his story is mostly one cliche after another, including, "The rain didn't seem to dampen [a fan's] mood." Try as he might, Brennan can't capture the excitement of the event. And the A-1 photo tells readers what he withholds: This preseason game was far from a sell-out.

It's one thing to obsessively talk up your stories in the newsroom, as Brennan does, but if you're going to fall for his bullshit, as Scandale does, at least have some great backup editing. None is evident here.


Scandale was castrated by head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes -- a lifer who has survived attempts to get her out of the way -- and later by Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who made wholesale changes in editorial coverage, while repudiating Scandale's coverage of 20-year-olds. All the editor has got left is the front page, and what a mess he is making of it.

 But I guess readers should be thankful for some real news on A-1 today. New Jersey political leaders deserve praise for trying to de-politicize the debate over the Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero, but Governor Christie's steamroller hasn't reformed the state's many authorities, boards and commissions. 

The lead story in Local is Teaneck officials' proposal to combine Police and Fire Departments, with a projected savings of $250,000. Why didn't Sykes ask the Hackensack and Englewood reporters to get reaction from officials in their cities, which also have professional fire departments and are similar to Teaneck demographically?

Of course, there is no municipal news of Englewood or Hackensack today, but you'll find an expanded obituary on Gene Hacker, the camera shop owner (L-6). Road Warrior John Cichowski squanders another column today, this one on roadside litter, as he ignores his mission of writing about the woes of commuters once again.

Rubbing salt in his wounds

Image via Wikipedia

A great newspaper acknowledges its mistakes. But at The Record of Woodland Park, editors do everything possible to hide their boneheaded decisions from readers. A perfect example is the brief story on Page A-4 today reporting that readers of the New York Post voted a Record staffer's 9/11 photo as the tabloid's cover of the decade.

Of course, The Record story carefully omits any mention of  how Editor Frank Scandale -- handling the biggest story of his life -- shamefully put money over journalism on Sept. 11, 2001, keeping Record photographer Thomas E. Franklin's unique flag-raising photo off of the front page and shoving it so far back in the paper, it ran on Page A-32 on Sept. 12, 2001. Although the photo was available in plenty of time for The Record's first edition, Scandale was told it would "cost too much" to remake Page 1.


The Post ran the photo on its front page the next day, Sept. 13, without giving credit to Franklin or The Record. The photo was used later on a U.S. postage stamp, but failed to win the Pulitzer Prize -- maybe because The Record and Scandale treated it so shabbily. It shows three firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center -- an image that has become one of the most famous in the history of photojournalism and recalls the iconic photo taken during World War II on Iwo Jima (photo below shows monument.)

Image by dbking via Flickr

This may be why Scandale talks incessantly about what he did at the Denver Post more than a decade ago or at Reuters wire service before that, but never boasts of what he has done since he came to The Record.

'The fish stinks from the head down'

Frank Scandale was named editor of The Record in 2001 after he helped the Denver Post win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. He was the latest out-of-town editor hired to remake the Hackensack daily. (He grew up in Westfield and worked at the Elizabeth Daily Journal, both outside The Record's circulation area.)

Scandale replaced Vivian Waixel, a Queens native who had worked her way up through the ranks and who I believe was the first woman to become editor. She was named executive editor of The Record and Herald News. Eventually, she left after being offered an office in a converted storage closet with a large window on the Hackensack newsroom.

When he was tested by 9/11, Scandale took part in the bone-headed decision by editors to relegate one of the most powerful images captured by a photographer that day to a back page to save the paper money. (See post, "Major detour on the road to a Pulitzer Prize.")

His reign as editor has been marked by increasing tension and animosity between dayside reporters and editors such as himself  and the nightside staff of news, layout and copy editors, who have been frozen out of decision-making and handcuffed for trying to improve news stories written by an increasingly inexperienced staff. For this reason alone, he should of been replaced long ago. But there is more:

1. He launched news and feature coverage of 20-year-olds in order to win new readers,  ignoring young people's addiction to the computer and that the baby boomers are the ones who have the money to patronize advertisers. In 2006, Publisher Stephen A. Borg called this initiative a "failed strategy."
2. He banned local news stories about one town from the front page, an edict that apparently still stands.
3. He did little to boost the number of minorities in the newsroom (before The Record's and Herald  News' staffs were merged), but did hire three from his old newspaper. And his third managing editor, Frank Burgos, is Hispanic. Still, one black editor left, the paper's only black columnist was fired and the paper's only Latino columnist was told to return exclusively to reporting, leading to his eventual departure.
4. He failed to stand up for his newsroom workers after money for ergonomic furniture was taken out of the budget year after year. Yet enough money was found to buy a dozen or so new, ergonomic desks, chairs and computers for the digital news group, which puts out The Record's online edition, and they were placed smack in the middle of the Hackensack newsroom for all to envy as they continued to use and be injured by furniture dating to the typewriter era.
5. He was rumored to have taken to lunch on separate occasions two of the most attractive young women on the reporting staff. If that is true, was it appropriate for an older editor to have lunch with a young female reporter? Or would a group setting have been wiser, especially in view of  the sexual harassment of women in the newsroom that Scandale and other editors, notably head assignment editor Deirdre Sykes, had long tolerated?  It got so bad at one point that the supervisor of  news clerks stopped hiring young women for the job.

I  have always heard about a Sicilian saying, "The fish stinks from the head down." (It is so appropriate here, given Scandale's Italian heritage.) Now, it's time for The Record to lop off the head and go fishing for a new editor.