Editor lives to sell newspapers

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Should a local newspaper put the Steve Jobs obit on Page 1?

What kind of news world does Editor Francis Scandale of the Record inhabit?


Scandale is not accountable to the public or his absentee publisher, so he's accustomed to doing what he wants with Page 1.


His only problems are his famously flawed news judgment and wrestling stories away from Deirdre Sykes, the immovable head assignment editor and real power in the Woodland Park newsroom.


The murder of a 23-year-old Teaneck woman wasn't front-page news on Wednesday, but the arrest of her husband leads the paper today. Why? To sell newspapers?


Then, Scandale demotes to the bottom of the page an engaging story about more aggressive forms of cancer in African-American women than in white women. That would have made a great A-1 patch.


Here's Job 1


A-1 is dominated today by the obituary of Steve Jobs, 56, a founder of Apple Inc., but why does Scandale put his death from cancer out front while uniformly banishing obituaries of prominent local residents to inside Local? 


Unfortunately, Jobs and other tech wizards have paid little attention to how their computers and smart phones continue to confound people 50 years old and older. 


So, it's no surprise Scandale makes such a big deal of his death. 


The editor has always ignored older newsroom workers, and apparently made no objection when Publisher Stephen A. Borg culled them as if they were chickens on the way to the slaughterhouse. 


No gold standard


One of those given the heave-ho was Nancy Cherry, co-slot or co-supervisor of the news copy desk, now in the incompetent hands of Editor Liz Houlton.


When Nancy left, no one bothered to enforce her strict standards of good writing and accuracy in text, photo captions and headlines.


So, today and nearly every day, the news copy desk runs wild, as in the A-1 headline for the Jobs story.


The co-founder of Apple Inc. becomes the "founder" in the four-deck headline. Two headline no-nos are ending a line with "was" or "of" -- both are violated here. 


Another inaccurate, inelegant and unimaginative headline. On Page 1, no less.


On A-2, there are three embarrassing corrections, one blamed "on incorrect information" from Englewood.


Remixing old news


The front of Sykes' Local section today seems to rehash a lot of old news.


Those Westwood and Hillsdale residents are demanding a solution to flooding, as they did a few weeks ago.


I didn't see any publicity in The Record about last weekend's Korean harvest festival in Bergen County, but here is a story about a second Korean festival, this one sponsored by a New York City group.


Another glowing downtown success story appears at the bottom of the page --this one on Glen Rock, where Scandale lives -- in contrast to total neglect of struggling downtowns in Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck, the county's most diverse communities.


Police news and news about the police -- not municipal news -- again dominate the section put out by Sykes and her supremely lazy assignment minions.


Cutting to the bone


In Better Living, I no longer see anything from free-lance food writer Amy Kuperinsky, who wrote numerous Starters and Martketplaces in recent years.


Today's Starter, "a first look at recently opened restaurants," is by Bob Probert, whose work has also appeared in (201) magazine.


Related articles

• Another puzzler from Liz Houlton's copy desk (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Where quality control is out of control (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)
• Why isn't anyone held accountable? (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)

A reader-friendly front page

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Now, this is a front page thousands of readers can relate to: Fare hikes and service cuts at NJ Transit, rising health insurance premiums for small businesses and, some really good news, more tickets for drivers who text or talk behind the wheel.

Why can't The Record of Woodland Park do this every day? These are the kind of quality-of-life issues North Jersey residents want to see reported even more than sensational crime stories and sports news. The NJ Transit story made radio news today and at least one station gave credit to "The Record of Hackensack."

The impact of Page 1 is lost by the time you get to the wishy-washy editorial on A-20, which lets Governor Christie and the acting transportation czar off the hook for not seeking higher gasoline taxes to fund road, bridge and mass transit projects, and for cutting NJ Transit subsidies.

Christie is favoring drivers and penalizing mass transit users who choose to leave their cars at home, as well as local bus riders who can't afford cars. 


Two Englewood stories appear in Local, the first since Feb. 18. Staff Writer Giovanna Fabiano reports that Mayor Frank Huttle strongly criticized city employees for doing a poor job of plowing -- during and after the two-day snowstorm last week.

Rather than going to Englewood right after the storm and reporting what she saw, Fabiaono attended a council meeting Tuesday night to get the story, which appears nearly a week after the storm ended. She didn't, for example, see or report how pedestrians were forced on Monday to walk in the narrow, dangerous roadway of Forest Avenue, not far from the Teaneck border, because property owners hadn't cleared their sidewalks.

As far as I know, The Record gives a pass to towns after every snowstorm, rarely if ever rating them on the effectiveness of plowing streets and clearing bus stops or reporting that some homeowners don't bother to shovel snow off their sidewalks.  

Head Assignment Editor Deirde Sykes and her lazy, incompetent minions simply don't care about readers' problems driving or walking after a snowstorm. Apparently, all the ungainly Sykes can manage is to try and avoid a repeat of her falling to the ground and injuring herself, as she did many years ago in the Hackensack parking lot.

You won't find any Hackensack or Teaneck news in the paper today.

Finally, for those who believe my tone is too harsh, all I can say is these are the high standards I was held to during 15-plus years as a reporter for The Record and two other daily newspapers, and during my seven years of freelance writing for The Record's Food section. Those standards were even higher during my nearly 20 years as a news copy editor in Hackensack.

In view of the dire straits The Record and other newspapers find themselves in, owners, editors and reporters should continue to be held to these high standards, and shouldn't belly-ache when they are taken to task for failing to live up to their responsibilities.