Image by Getty Images via @daylife| A Haitian boy with cholera on Oct. 25 in the courtyard of a crowded hospital in St. Marc, Haiti. It took 19 days for a similar image to appear on the front page of The Record. |
It's Friday and Editor Francis Scandale is desperate.
Much of the staff has taken a three-day weekend. Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes went to the restroom after lunch and hasn't been seen since. And it's time for the afternoon news meeting, when the stories and photos for Saturday's Page 1 are set and the layout editors are given their marching orders.
Scandale will always have Haiti, which the paper has virtually ignored since Staff Writer Joseph Ax returned from covering the devastating earthquake. So, here's a heart-wrenching photo of a child suffering from cholera and a caption plastered all over A-1 and not much more for the paper's premier page.
The lead front-page story -- about settlement of a suit filed by the family of a Teaneck man who died when his house exploded 28 months ago -- is rare in disclosing how much of the $450,000 will be going to the lawyer or lawyers.
In contrast to the non-fatal accidents that usually dominate the front of Local, the death of a 30-year-old woman hit by a landscaping truck is the patch element on L-1 today. Next to it is a story on leaky sewer pipes in Oradell.
Fortifying the impression that Sykes has antifreeze running through her body, readers are told nothing about the victim beyond her name and age. Was she a mother, wife, daughter, sister? Where did she live? What did she do? Why was she in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano has her sixth story about that city or Englewood Cliffs since Nov. 5 -- an unusually productive streak for her -- but there are no Hackensack or Teaneck stories in the paper today.
In fact, Sykes and her lazy, incompetent minions don't come close to filling the section with local news, necessitating two long, wire-service obituaries of people you have never heard of -- typical for a Saturday.
The "Dine Out Guide" that came with the paper today is an advertising section full of superlatives, and includes only restaurants that paid for the privilege.
