The Pocono Record newsroom has been the recipient of some good news recently: We won the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (PICPA) “Truth in Finances Award” in the small newspaper category and we won in several categories in the PNA Foundation “Newspaper of the Year” Contest. The “Truth in Finances Award” award honors “excellence [...]
So this newbie executive editor from New Yawk finds himself on his first day in the lobby of the Pocono Record, smothered by anxiety and doubt about coming to a new newsroom. At the counter he is greeted by a smiling, cheerful young lady who extends her hand and says: “Hi, I’m Marta Gouger.” The [...]
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 [...]