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| A reflecting pool installed in one of the Twin Towers' footprints in Manhattan. |
By Victor E. Sasson
Editor
The 9/11 attack on America -- visible from The Record's building in Hackensack -- was and is the biggest story ever handled by the staff.
Reporters and photographers in the field were competing against the world media.
And the towers of smoke in lower Manhattan were framed in the windows of the newsroom on River Street, where editors worked to put out an extra and then the next day's edition.
Scoops the world
Staff Photographer Thomas E. Franklin scored the scoop of a lifetime with his photo of three firemen raising an American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center, advancing the story and offering a glimmer of hope that America was down, not out.
But in Hackensack, the Borg family and the editors let down Franklin by burying his iconic photo on a back page on Sept. 12, 2001, and they are still treating him and the rest of the photo staff like shit.
Dissing Franklin
On A-2 today, the editors run two corrections -- including a fix for a screw-up in a Mike Kelly column -- but couldn't care less about repairing a major production error on Saturday.
A story on Franklin's 9/11 photo that began on Saturday's Better Living cover ended in mid-sentence, cutting off a quote from the photographer about the meaning of his incredible image to others (BL-3).
Why wasn't the last sentence of his quote run in complete form today, on A-2?
Ambulance chasers
Page A-2 also is where the SHOT OF THE DAY appears.
But the images aren't the best from the local photography staff, as they should be, but from AP photographers in Bangladesh and other far-off places.
For the past few years, Staff Photographer Tariq Zehawi and others have been employed as so many ambulance chasers by the incredibly lazy local editors, Deirdre Sykes, Tim Nostrand and Dan Sforza -- who use images of fender benders and non-fatal rollover accidents as filler.
More 9/11 coverage
Today's 9/11 anniversary coverage appears on Page 1 and the covers of Opinion and Travel.
Editor Marty Gottlieb and Staff Writer Shawn Boburg dredge up a 27-year-old deal on the World Trade Center naming rights (A-1).
Who cares? What does this mean to me?
Boburg completely ignores other Port Authority actions, rubber stamped by Governor Christie, that affect hundreds of thousands of North Jersey residents -- the bistate agency's refusal to expand mass transit and risk losing revenue from exorbitant tolls and parking fees.
More boring politics
In another silly political "ANALYSIS" on the front-page today, are readers expected to take seriously charges from Tea Pot crackpot Steve Lonegan that his opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, is an "extremist"?
Unfortunately for Staff Writer Melissa Hayes and the headline writer, state Sen. Barbara Buono never uses the word "extremist" in describing Christie, the GOP bully (A-1).
Buono says Christie is "anything but" the social moderate he likes to call himself (A-6).
And as another story shows, Christie simply hates minorities -- poverty in New Jersey continues to grow, especially in Passaic County (A-3).
On Friday, to balance the lead A-1 story on Christie hiding important tax-revenue data, The Record ran another front-page story, an upbeat account about the governor's meeting with schoolchildren in Monachie.
When asked why he wanted to be governor, Christie didn't compare himself to such predecessors as Jon Corzine, but said "he thought he could do a better job ... than some of the politicians he put in prison" as U.S. attorney (Friday's A-6). LOL.
Wrong tip
On the front of Local today, Road Warrior John Cichowski has a light column about drivers who tip gas station attendants, ignoring all the poor gas jockeys who have been murdered for a fistful of dollars (L-1).
Why is "The Addled Commuter" wasting readers' time again?
The editors didn't think much of the obituary for Franklin Lakes artist Cornelia "Corny" Baker, who died "recently" at 84, demoting it to L-3.
Did layout minion Jim Cornelius, also known as Corny, have anything to do with that?
More on chefs
On the Better Living front, another column by Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung ignores challenges faced by consumers and focuses instead on two local chefs' menu ideas (BL-1).
Why is the column called The Corner Table?
Another screw-up
Did anyone stick with Mike Kelly's rambling column on the naming of the new World Trade Center all the way to the end (O-1)?
Of course, the biggest question is why does "The Shit-Eating Grin" call the tower "1 World Trade Center" when it is described as "One World Trade Center" in Boburg's story on Page 1 today?
These are the kinds of problems that are supposed to be fixed by Production Editor Liz Houlton, the six-figure "Queen of Errors" and supervisor of the copy desk.
But as readers saw on Saturday -- with the fractured quote from Franklin, the photographer who can't get any respect -- the Borgs continue to pay Houlton, despite all the paper's production screw-ups.
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