You might see from the chart about school security on our front page today that Pocono Mountain School District was absent. We surveyed all school districts in the Poconos and asked for yes/no answers to a list of straightforward questions concerning some features of school security. For instance, we asked whether districts [...]
Readers recently complained about the (mis)treatment of their comments below stories posted online. They charged that their comments were being censored or deleted and that we were pushing our own agenda. One reader even asked: “When did the Pocono Record hire Josef Stalin as its editor?” Since my email reply to that reader is posted [...]
When an obit makes a political statement what’s an editor to do? Such was the conundrum confronting me Tuesday afternoon when I was alerted by Editorial Assistant Kathy Roland to an incoming obituary for John A. Reich of Dingmans Ferry, who died at the age of 91. Reich’s obit read pretty conventionally until you [...]
Want to know who some of the better-paid public servants are in the Poconos? Or what your school district superintendent earns? Or how much your township spends on salaries of certain employees? In an effort to make things more transparent and accessible, we’ve created a searchable database of Pocono public payrolls based on figures compiled [...]
Many reader emails I get are related to questions about why we run certain stories over others. Why don’t you run more news about religion? Or politics? Or housing? Or… You get the idea. The truthful (and somewhat smart aleck) answer is: All the news that fits, we print. What we print, how much and [...]
There are things they simply do not teach you in J (journalism) school. Nor is there enough training in the world to prepare you for the weird conversations you can find yourself in as a newspaper editor. Take, for example, this recent email exchange between myself and copy editor/designer Andrea Higgins. The subject of her [...]
Just a heads up that if you open up the D section of this Sunday’s paper and things look unfamiliar, it’s not your mind playing tricks. We have revamped the section to re-organize features and columns and introduce some new ones. Here are the highlights: • We are introducing “Pocono My Ride,” featuring Donna Kessler. [...]
I frequently get emails or phone calls asking: Why did you put this in the paper? Don’t you have anything better to report? Don’t you know that what you published is not news? Two recent cases in point: In one email, a reader criticized us for publishing a story about a state police investigation into [...]
This is pretty cool: A national blogger who writes about newspaper design and copy desk issues highlighted our Sunday front page as one of the “five most arresting front page visuals.” Credit copy desker/designer Tom Ostrosky with the page one design and copy desker/designer Andrea Higgins with an assist for finding the appropriate art to [...]
There is a popular blog, Twitter feed and even a one-time TV show called “S— My Dad Says.” I am reminded of this in the context of a phone call I took from a reader Wednesday, the day after the Pennsylvania primaries. The caller had several questions, among them was about the placement of the [...]