Let’s be edifying about lesser
female media workers—taking a sour song and making it sweeter
[This entry covers so much
ground, as to facts and ethical principles, that a future “Appendix” may be in
order. See also “Special Note” with “Defamation Check” after the “End notes,”
as to whether this entry may pose a danger to the real person pseudonymed
Skoder. Part 1 to this entry’s Part 2 is here. Subpart A is on my
other blog, viewable here. Edits done 4/17/13, including missing links added. Edit 6/3/13.]
One point of relevance: When people talk for various purposes about
who’s a journalist and who’s not, in some very pungent cases like this one that
follows, it’s amazing how many marks of a clearly unprofessional journalist, or
even a non-journalist, are missed by
those supervising such a person. This Skoder is so pretentious that, as we’ll
see below, she dates the start of her “news writing” to about the same year she
got her general equivalency diploma (GED), a substitute for a high school
diploma—at age 30 or later. And yet when my boss at North Jersey Newspapers,
NR, and I were at loggerheads in part over Skoder in 1999-2000, NR once had a
person intervene with a brusque letter to me in about late 1999, the publisher
(or similar rank) at NJN at the time—who it could be said was hoodwinked on the
Skoder matter: Richard Vezza, now the publisher of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper. Yet even NJN
eventually dumped Skoder, in late 2000.
[The narrative is more
fun than this set of introductory stuff suggests!]
Subsections below:
1. The mountaintop
article was assigned in about the middle of my “tenure,” and an interview with
Mulvihill including his use of mild profanity showed how unlikely it was I
could get a mountaintop tour
2. The assignment was
premised on a foreordained position of Skoder’s—that there was illegal
development on the mountain
3. My trying to do
the story the best way given the circumstances involved lots of time and
footwork
4. Skoder received
the article, and did anything but treat it like nonpolitical journalism
5. Skoder raised the
“point” that I had not done the assignment as she directed
6. A number of low-level reporters were required by Skoder to do
stakeout or deep-investigation stories (which were more or less apt to fail)
7. Some highlights of
the desultory “denouement” of my time there
8. What (on August
18) set up my resigning (in September) (start)
(further numbered
sections are in subpart C)
[Four-digit numbers in brackets refer, for my purposes, to
journal entries from which parts of the narrative are derived.]
The first meeting of any sort in township government that I
covered for The Vernon News
(reflected in copious reporter-notebook notes) was on July 5, 1989. This
happened closely after an earlier opportunity for possible work.
A note dated July 3 in my
journal says that on July 2, a Sunday, someone from the local recreational
business, Action Park, called—I’d applied there, being that desperate as to try
to work there for the summer—and wanted me to work that day or night “if
possible.” I said no. (My mother had stopped working there in 1985, and she had
worked there, usually in the summers, from 1981 [I think] to 1985. She felt it
was typical of them how they asked me to start working. She didn’t disapprove
of my not opting to get the work because she knew it was by no means a
first-choice place for me to work, and she still had a dim view of the place
from her own work time there.) [6738]
I think I felt I was risking my ability to work any further
that summer at Action
Park by saying no to this
sudden request, but I felt it was best for me. Though I might have applied
there earlier in the 1990s, ultimately I never worked there, and was always rather
proud of this fact. Of all the places or situations in the township in which
I’d gotten paid work in my pay-for-college years, I never actually worked at
Action Park—and never considered doing so, or applied for such work, until (I
believe) 1989, and even then, I arranged (simply by refusing to conform with a
ridiculous request about when to
work) that it wouldn’t happen.
Probably part of my reasoning was that I had the Vernon News work coming up. From this
standpoint, it’s ironic that one main thing that my “having a job” at The Vernon News foundered on was a story
about the owner of Action
Park, Great American
Recreation (GAR).
(A point I make in a journal entry from July 31, quoted
below, that interrelated the two work possibilities suggests that I could
possibly have worked at Action Park while also
working for VN, but it’s plausible that
for the immediate short term, I just didn’t want to hamper my ability
schedule-wise to work for VN by
working for Action Park. Another issue, mentioned in an editorial insertion at
the July 31 journal entry below, and related to my being impartial about Gene
Mulvihill, seems like one of a speculative set of notions.)
The Vernon News
work would pretty heavily occupy me for a little over a month, to judge from
the volume of my notes in the relevant “reporter’s” notebook. And I recall it
as being a busy time—and generally speaking, it came in a damp, hot part of
summer when you’d much rather be gainfully employed than idle and hungering for
work.
But by the time I was done, I had several articles published
that made up some of the real meat of specific issues of the paper, and could
be used by me for writing samples, but many of which were botched (or at least
flawed) by editing in some way. My relations with the editor, Skoder, would
become such that, a rarity for me, in September I wrote a critical letter to her
superior (as part of resigning), which resulted in Skoder’s huge ranting letter
in reply, ending with a threat to sue me. I would be so thrown by this—there
was such an upsetting aspect of losing such work when I desperately needed it
(I had student loans to repay, among other things)—that I threw my typewriter,
an IBM Personal Typewriter I’d bought in 1985, to the floor, the only time I’ve
ever done that. (What I’m reflecting on is largely the barbarism of Skoder’s handling of my overall work opportunity with
her paper.) In September I would do a full-court press to land serviceable
enough work, and to my surprise, got it—work for Wells Fargo Guard Services,
starting in September 1989 and running through December 1990 (usually not
full-time, per week)—the longest non-career-type job (in terms of substance of
work) that I’ve had since the Marvin Center, and the last such job since 1990.
(About four months of it would overlap with the start of my time at All
American Crafts, August-December 1990.)
Skoder would be fired from The Vernon News in mid-1991—thus being kept there approaching two more
years after I left, along with another worker in September 1989 (who also got a
long, ranting, suit-threatening letter from Skoder). I don’t think Skoder would
ever work as a newspaper editor again—though she would have a series of
stringer-reporting jobs, at small newspapers covering Vernon Township primarily
(in fact, her own beat was this, by her choice). (This will be reviewed below.)
And though she would indeed start suing people in town—multi-defendant suits,
alleging defamation, along with whatever else—in 1993, I would never be named
as a defendant. But she would carry enough of a grudge against me after our six
weeks’ “association” in 1989 that, a full nine
years later, she would work quite
outlandishly to help me to be disgraced in a situation on the township
Environmental Commission, on which I’d already served two years (1996-97), as I
recount on my other blog, November 21 entries mainly (see especially this entry).
This all seems notorious enough, but I could have been
persuaded to just relegate it to my personal “archives,” not to be discussed
(as was basically the case for years), as a minor incident about an eminently
unprofessional superior at a crappy newspaper. But when you consider the 20
years of what Skoder has wrought coming after it, it makes sense to recount
this old story, as putrid as it seems today (to me) in some ways—because even
her newspaper pieces in 2010 and 2011 show her style of subjecting local
political figures to her crocodile jaws of what she considers investigative
reporting and trenchant opinion-doling columns (and the people who are her
targets typically serve as lower-level board members who, as township law has
it, don’t get paid—and the mayor and members of the town council only get
stipends).
In some fundamental sense, this is someone who never
learned. And for all her threats of lawsuits against others for defamation—it
occurred even within the past decade (2001-10), when the Internet generally opened
up a new avenue for “causes” of such lawsuits—she never realized that other
people have rights too, and that she has subjected people to needless public
scorn (if not defamation) simply with her biased way of reporting. (On this
last, see subsection 11 in subpart C.)
One thing that really gave me food for thought when I
started this series on Skoder last November, bounding ahead into it rather
headlong and stimulated by the disturbance of Hurricane Sandy, was seeing, on a
condolence-related Web site for Gene Mulvihill, who ostensibly was the first
reason for me to write on a Vernon Township matter, some passing reference to
Skoder’s seeming to have “signed” the online condolence book. Skoder giving condolences to Mr. Mulvihill’s
family! Well, it wasn’t impossible. People can give condolences to whom
they choose, per their sense of what is right. But this was ironic to consider after what Skoder had done regarding
Mulvihill and a land-development issue that was a concern among numerous other
township leaders of various stripes in summer 1989 (while concerns about the
relevant land would linger among numerous people, including nongovernmental
members of the public, for years after).
1. The mountaintop
article was assigned in about the middle of my “tenure,” and an interview with
Mulvihill including his use of mild profanity showed how unlikely it was I
could get a mountaintop tour
As I’d forgotten, the GAR/mountaintop article came about in
the middle of my “tenure” at the VN
in 1989. Notes in my notebook on it start on or just after July 14, and I
started to do systematic research into old VN
clippings on Mulvihill and the mountaintop land on or just after July 21.
I’m not entirely sure if I had a 40-minute phone
conversation (related to the article) with Mr. Mulvihill on or just after July 21, but I certainly did at some
point. My notes on specific things he said included one I did not include in my
article draft, which seems not fully complimentary of him, but which gives an
idea of how generally informal he could be with a reporter (as I witnessed a
few times) and also how badgered he apparently felt by the criticisms he
received in relation to the mountaintop issue: regarding a body of water on the
mountain called Green Lake, he said that anyone “who says it wasn’t there [for
a long time beforehand] is an asshole.” He referred to some contention or
belief on the part of Arlene Holbert as “a figment of her imagination.”
If a reference to “an asshole” reflected his attitude in
this matter—even if I took it in all good humor—how could I expect to get a
mountaintop tour from him or his company, to
be shown whether there was “illegal building” or “illegal lakes”?
Just after some business on this story, in my notebook are
copious notes on one of my most memorable articles from that time, on
contamination of water in the village of Vernon; this came amid my longer-term
work on the GAR/mountaintop article, because after the water notes are some on
an interview (related to the mountaintop issue) with engineer John Lehman (on
July 24), who worked for GAR. This was a key interview.
2. The assignment was
premised on a foreordained position of Skoder’s—that there was illegal
development on the mountain
The assignment Skoder gave me about GAR/mountaintop was (at
least as she exclusively described it after I had labored to produce the
article) to have a tour given to me by GAR to
show me, or for me to find out, if there was illegal building going on on the
mountain. My notebook, early in my notes on this, notes that Skoder spoke
of “illegal lakes,” as if she was sure of this as a fact (and I accordingly
used quotes, which served somewhat as scare quotes).
The problem for me was obvious pretty quickly: how would
GAR, or Mr. Mulvihill in particular, going to assent to my being given a tour
if the objective was to find illegal construction?
If there was this, were they going to admit to it? Or if there was this, and
they didn’t outwardly identify it,
how was I to identify it myself? I don’t recall whether the idea was to take a
camera and photo whatever I found up there, with GAR escorting me (I did have a
camera, but not professional-grade; I would use my own homely camera later). It
just seemed paradoxical and almost too ridiculous to have the assignment framed
in this way. Possibly at first I didn’t regard the tour idea so scornfully and
just set about a practical solution.
3. My trying to do
the story the best way given the circumstances involved lots of time and
footwork
I set about doing the story the best way I could: I would
interview several people, and even hike on land I thought was public land from
a map I had, and see what I could see on the mountaintop from there.
Not only did I interview Mulvihill and engineer Lehman (the
latter was in an office in Warwick,
N.Y., and I spoke with him
there), but I interviewed several town “leaders,” whether they were on boards
or otherwise publicly involved. I spoke with Arlene Holbert, who was chair of
the Planning Board, and with Marianne Reilly (she was on the township
Environmental Commission at the time; later she would run for township council,
and win, and eventually be mayor [generally, at the time the township mayor was
named from among township council members after they ran and got on just under
that status]).
One of the things about my work on this story that provoked
the most controversy for Skoder, not expected by me, was my hiking on land near
what used to be called Great Gorge South, which is (as I didn’t appreciate at
the time) a couple miles or so from the actual location of the mountaintop land
in question, which was to the east of the further-north area (from Great Gorge
South) that was called at one time Vernon Valley Ski Resort, and now is part of
Mountain Creek. I had a township map from 1985, and determined where I could
access state land off part of Route 517 in the McAfee area. I had a Polaroid camera
(and possibly some other camera).
It was a tough climb up steep terrain, and you had to pick
your way through sometimes dense brush to finally get to where you saw stuff
like ski lift and power-line infrastructure on a mountaintop. This was atop the
mountain bearing Great Gorge South. (I have a Polaroid photo showing some of
this.) Some little road or such that I saw carved into the hillside area there
was not represented on what corresponded to this area on the map. (I would find
later that the map was outdated, but this became one item of “facts” that informed
my final story.)
The work on the article, including interviews, writing, and
ancillary “office”-type stuff amounted to over seven hours. Apparently the hike
was not included in this; that was another few hours. The enormous amount of
time I spent on this article probably would have meant that even if it earned
me $20 in piecework fashion, my pay rate would be below $3 an hour, maybe even
below $2 an hour.
A pdf of the
typescript of the article can be seen here. A Word document reproducing this, with
editorial comments added (important
to review in relation to the 1989 draft), is here.
(This old article draft refers to the “Great Gorge Mountainview Resort,” which
was a later name, under different owners, for what was the Playboy Hotel until
about early 1982; on one person’s work experience there in earlier years, see
this entry for the start of a series. For information on the set of
allegations regarding which Mulvihill pleaded guilty regarding a few counts—in
connection with both criminal charges and civil complaints—see this blog entry from last fall.)
4. Skoder received
the article, and did anything but treat it like nonpolitical journalism
Skoder was given the article draft, and some strange things
happened as she dealt with it. One I recall very vividly is that she discussed
it with local resident GD (whom I happened to find in the VN office), who at the time was not at all a VN employee, but who I think was on the township Zoning Board (GD
certainly was on the Zoning Board at some point in my attending meetings in
town over years). GD was the person who, like a Soviet dissident only too happy
to wax loquacious about the likes of Skoder in 1998, is who told me about what
limited education Skoder had in 1989, along with much else.
By 1998, GD had been named in a six-defendant defamation
lawsuit in which Skoder, basically, sued a raft of former friends that amounted
to almost her sole clique in the early 1990s or so…need I say more? (Here we
can see one aspect of the unseemly way Skoder both tried to function as a news
reporter and yet as a pseudo-politically aligned person in town, operating “in
sync” with people on one side or another of local political issues.)
Anyway, on about July 28, Skoder and I had a talk about the
article in her office. She was decisively dissatisfied with it; I believe this
is the occasion where—for the first time in any editorial job I had, and in
this case making a lot of sense—I lost my temper with her and held firm on
something, or pointedly confronted her in some way. For years, I used to think
this little episode was what triggered me into having that job abruptly end,
but actually, the job would drag on for another couple weeks, but I’m sure
Skoder would file away (in her mental Rolodex for “safekeeping” for the next
several years) that one discrete “grossly impertinent” confrontation I made…. (Keep in mind that, of all the people who
dealt with this GAR/mountaintop land story, I was the least disposed to
consider Mulvihill simply guilty of illegal development. And yet my work on
this issue was not accepted or paid for, and I was backed into a corner on the
professional aspect of this with how Skoder acted.)
In this discussion, Skoder, in a way I would come to see as
typical, resorted to insulting me by questioning whether I could read a map
(!!). Actually, as a general matter, I had hiked in far-flung parts of Wawayanda State Park in 1986 and 1987, on many
little woods-roads and trails in there, and had also worked at the park for the
state in summer 1987. So I knew something about how to apply orienteering
skills, vis-à-vis a map, to working my way through woods.
Another odd facet—actually, a quite bizarre one—of this around-July
28 office conversation related to her confronting me about having “trespassed”
on GAR land or such. She revealed she knew I’d been hiking on the land reached
off Route 517—before I even told her about this. This made me wonder who had
told her. Had someone from a house on Route 517 seen me, and reported it? (But
how would the person there have known I worked for The Vernon News?)
The most reasonable source, I would figure later, was John
Lehman, the civil engineer who worked for GAR, whom I’d interviewed at his
office in Warwick, N.Y. For one thing, my hike on the land was
on July 17; my interview with Lehman was on about July 24. His informing Skoder
on my being on the land was a bit of a sneaky move on his part, which he nevertheless
couldn’t anticipate having the results in Skoder’s pettifogging that she would
produce with me, but his act contributed to the overall treacherous and
domino-effect quality of the mess here. Over the years I had seen this man
numerous times in the Vernon Township municipal building supporting an
application by GAR (or occasionally some other client), and I never cared for
him; he always seemed to me on the smarmy or insincere side, even when he
seemed willing to be courteous and seemingly forthright with you.
Part of the reason I had (accidentally) gone on the GAR land
(which Skoder pettifoggingly made into an issue as if it testified to my signal
lack of judgment here) was that I did not know the specific area of land I was
on now belonged to them. I was following a 1985 map that, unknown to me, had
been superseded by some subsequent changes in ownership, including GAR having
bought (or been granted) land off Route 517 that had once belonged to the
state.
To do an intermediate sum: with a story that did not deliver
the conclusion about illegal construction that Skoder wanted “confirmed,” I
gave her investigation, but she insulted
me as to whether I could read a map; she accused me of trespassing on GAR land
(and yet my getting a tour in order to find illegal building was, somehow,
acceptable to her); and she said (as we’ll see) the article was just my
opinion.
I remember also hearing her say to someone else in the
office, a day or more later, that that day of the confrontation with me, she
had greeted her husband in the driveway of her home and just broke into tears
there…showing how dreadful her day had been, or such. So she’d cried—because
I’d pointedly confronted her? I never put much stock in this remark other than
to regard her—especially considering all else I’m relating about her—as a
particularly pause-giving version of the type of woman who, if she can’t resort to tears in a
confrontation with someone (to try to get her way), she’ll allude to doing so
manipulatively in some later context.
I think it was Jan P., my coworker, who agreed that (as had
apparently happened with her) Skoder would put you in an awkward, sort of
no-win situation and then turn the tables on you and act as if the resulting
problem was your fault.
You might also begin to ask, if she didn’t have a high
school degree until about age 30, what kind of paid work had she done in her
twenties, if any? Certainly none that would have prepared her for this editor
job.
5. Skoder raised the
“point” that I had not done the assignment as she directed
Since this VN job
for me was, after all, a job meant to
bring in income, the emotional trouble it posed me went beyond what might
seem the details I give here. That is, when it came to my depending on it for
money, there was something rather fundamentally disturbing about this job
situation after a while. (This sort of problem becomes pretty common in the
publishing world, when supervisors treat your ability to get work opportunities
cavalierly, but this 1989 version was one of the worst I would ever experience,
even taking into consideration my newness to it.)
And regarding the specific GAR story at hand, the practical
situation that set up the more “deep-rooted” psychological situation was
Skoder’s claiming I had not done “what she had assigned” (this is not a direct
quote)—despite the fact that, as I said above, it was impossible to do what she
assigned.
Two journal entries suggest the emotional undercurrents
(commentary from today is interposed in brackets):
[6818] [July
28] Conflict (more impressive to others than to me) w[ith] [Skoder] at [the]
paper—which you could say the personalities [of us] were ripe for, [and] the
troublesome article I wrote[, the GAR one, was] a catalyst for. (I had [a]
somewhat bad feeling [about the implications of what might have been accepted
as a] rather run-of-the-mill article [i.e., this one], after doing it; but [I]
didn’t expect such [a] tendentious response from [Skoder].) She claimed I hadn’t followed the essential
assignment, to get [a] tour of [the] m[oun]t[ai]ntop land—[without] which
“there w[oul]d have been no story.” At one point she said the story was just
“my [GL’s] opinion”—which is pretty true; it’s a sort of “news analysis,”
N[ew] Y[ork] T[imes]-style [though I don’t remember if I made this specific
point to her. What I did feel at the time, and what is a major aspect of this
blog entry’s theme, is that I had no other choice than how I did the article].
… [boldface added]
[6823] [July
31] Conflict w[ith] boss [Skoder] at paper … has resulted in visceral [stress
states] w[ith] me—before [and] after [the] Mulvihill article [was] submitted.
It s[houl]d not be thought [by whoever might learn all the background facts?] that
this [article] had the emotional “charge” it did w[ith] me [specifically]
because I declined [an] Action Park job [in early July; this job would have
been a very simple, flunky-type thing, something desperately gotten for quick
cash], as if I declined [the] job simply
to be objective re Mulvihill [in doing the newspaper work]. Because I simply did not do that…. [I think part
of this point is that on the one hand, it seemed the emotional trouble of my
job’s being in jeopardy was because of Skoder’s taking issue with my initiative here, and yet this
“emotional undercurrent” might have also been “set up” or related to—in my
mind, as I tried to interpret why things got so friable then—by my having dared
to not take the Action Park job, which
could have put more money into my pocket, as superstitious of me as this
sounds. It’s possible I also felt that someone could raise the question whether
I wanted to keep myself “impartial” on Mulvihill and GAR by not working at Action Park,
which was not a bad choice to have made, but as my 1989 entry says, something
like this wasn’t my only reasoning. By the way, I don’t think Skoder had any
knowledge of the possibility I could have gotten a job at Action Park; she
shouldn’t have needed to know about it]….
Why [the] article
s[houl]d make for such a to-do [including or especially with Skoder], I don’t
know. [But today the reason would seem
to be that, after all my work on it, for her to joust with me seemingly along
the lines of our respective initiative and judgment—while mine was in
contravention of her agenda, which was to “catch Mulvihill doing illegal
development”—was an inevitability, though I consider her own moral standing here
to be the weakest, given how biased she was against Mulvihill—or if she had her
opinion about the development of the mountain, she should have let the
assiduous reporter do his or her work as his own worker, not as a puppet of her.]
Interestingly,
[Skoder] hung on her argument that I had not done as assigned (i.e. to ask Mul[vihill] to be escorted onto [the]
m[oun]t[ai]n, which [the] article’s existence [in Skoder’s view] w[oul]d solely
depend on)—which was a “point” she said I was “missing”—[as with] others I’ve
had run-ins with (cf. [a professor at graduate school]) [who] hung on their arguments which were not totally
faithful to the facts. In retrospect I c[oul]d see that asking for [a]
m[oun]t[ai]n-top inspection was not the
original assignment. [What could be said
in addition to this—along with the whole general theme of this blog entry, that
Skoder’s conception of how to do the article was preposterous and
unrealistic—is that for her to take such a high-handed approach with me (given my
education and work experience), even taking into consideration my “greenness”
as a reporter, while she had only gotten her GED about five years before, shows
the height of how galling and pretentious she could be. See End note 1. By the
way, ironically,
Skoder said at one point (maybe in her response to my September letter to her
superiors) that she had taken me on as a risk, given my experience at the New Jersey Herald (paste-up work) in
1988 and my brief stint with The
Star-Ledger in spring 1989 (infrequent stringer work)—as if those jobs were
my only work experience!!! My Marvin
Center experience was
totally overlooked. And what exactly was her
work experience prior to getting her GED?]
After [I had]
interview[ed] people in Sunset Ridge [for their] reactions to [the] arrest of
[name redacted; a man who was accused of sexual abuse or such, less of a
hot-button topic then than it would be today], [and my] telling [Skoder] none
of them wanted to comment for the paper, she called me back [and] said to write
on such comments as I’d heard, even if [the interviewees had] requested to be
“off the record.” [This looks appallingly unprofessional of her, by today’s
standards.]
This was a
“conflict w[ith] [my] own [moral] sense” I had to work out, though not a piquant or esp[ecially] troubling one. I
ended up giving a non-quoting article to [Skoder] [and] she said what I thought [she should do], that she s[houl]d interview the people [and]
might have more success because she knew them. [Actually, as a practical
tactic, this wasn’t a terrible idea—at least it took the burden of the task off
me; but it shows how unprofessional she was here, being so dogged about
interviewing people on that kind of matter—and they were all neighbors of the
man; I remember trooping around to try to get interviews, and the moral sense
among the interviewees that they didn’t want to say anything on record was very
understandable. As I recall, she did get some quotes for that article.]
Perhaps this
latter conflict wasn’t so difficult—it was a type that seemed more difficult
for a [somewhat] recent college grad [as I was; and from a more humorous, sly
viewpoint today, we could say it was easier for an age-30-GED recipient like
Skoder]—because my future (long-term)
doesn’t stem from this job like it did from school…, when other conflicts
caused crises [for me]. [A young person’s sort of point, but it’s ironic to
consider how, though I would have many more solid career stints in the next 24
years, this VN situation is still
memorable for how crassly managed it was by Skoder.]
There would still be work I would do there, including on the
water-contamination story. This would be a pretty substantial story, involving
literally a lot of footwork, and yielding a story clip I should be proud of,
but it was so damaged by editing that it fell into the “bin” of statistics I
made on these stories of the worst-edited ones.
By the way, I wasn’t the only reporter who Skoder, the not-long-ago
GED recipient that she was in 1989, tried to press into her “school” of the
investigative reporting she would later claim to do, while today her LinkedIn
page says she started work as a “news writer” in 1986.
6. A number of low-level reporters were required by Skoder to do
stakeout or deep-investigation stories (which were more or less apt to fail)
My larger story of the
Mulvihill/Skoder situation of 1989 echoes a sort of “assignment style” from
Skoder that both Jan and, apparently, Christina Clark Rohde were also subjected
to (and who knows how many other writers who worked under Skoder). Skoder, as
she has suggested in columns over the years, has prided herself on being an
investigative reporter. Well, for whatever reason she thought that kind of
reporting was suited to a small-town
newspaper—never mind the tone with which, and the set of premises from which,
she tackled the investigative reporting (which painted opposing sides as
black-hatted and white-hatted)—she seemed to think that the stringer reporters
under her should be pressed into doing this same kind of reporting.
So Jan was pressed into doing a
“stakeout” kind of story, from what she told me. Skoder was convinced a local
septic-tank pumping businessman was doing illegal dumping. Skoder had Jan wait
out at some location to try to catch the man (or one of his workers, maybe) in
the act. From what I recall of this story of Jan’s, this seemed
ridiculous—there may have been no story there at all, or if there was, to press
a stringer reporter into staking out a location, etc., was asking far too much
(and may have been crossing some other ethical and/or legal boundaries).
It seems Christina Clark Rohde
was required at some point to do something of the same thing (I would need her
further input on this to flesh the story out).
7. Some highlights of
the desultory “denouement” of my time there
The strange way my time wound down at this job is shown in
the accumulation of journal entries I made on my last days with the job. (It’s
funny how this often happens with media jobs: you never have so much cause to
record the dense episodes and phases of a brewing storm of weirdness as you do in your last weeks, or days, there.)
[6860] [August
12] …An editorial in the 8-11 VN by
[Skoder] gripes about “unenforceable codes” [actually, it probably wasn’t that
they were unforceable, but merely happened
not to be enforced in some instances; we’re probably talking building codes or
zoning codes; and then, how serious were the deviations from codes?]—[and]
about how crackdowns [crackdowns! As
if we in town had a banana-republic dictatorship!] are needed on violators of
codes in town. This sounds interestingly
similar (or, related) to the point I
was making in the GAR article she rejected. [See the article here (pdf of original) and here (modern interpretation).] [boldface added]
[6861] [August
12] …I’ve worked an average of about 9 h[ou]rs/w[ee]k for [five] wks. to Aug. 5
and am paid (assuming $90 next Sat.) about $3.80 [per] hour.
Of seven
articles I’ve had publ[ished] till now (written in the above [five] w[eek]s),
[three] have botched but not (seriously) misleading sentences [as edited], and
[two] others have sentences edited [with the effect of] be[ing] misleading (and
in one case a botched sentence too). [Five out of seven are] bad[--that is,
articles with notable editing problems].
[6866] [August
14] … Jan at VN said she’ll quit
[her] office job [she was a sort of office manager there as well as a reporter
for the paper]—because of the “paranoia” [of Skoder]—but [she would] try to
continue writing for [the] paper.
[Skoder] said
today she wants to talk to both Jan [and] me “about our quotes”—they are “hard
to understand” (or some such thing). [Ironically, both Jan and I would be gone
from the paper within a few weeks.]
[6875] [August
15; this entry will be explained in the paragraph immediately after] Notes on Vernon News lawsuit threat related to
Jan’s leaving: Immediate reason for [Skoder]/Jan blow-up—[was] Jan contacts
w[ith] friend (last name Coppola?) whose [mere last] name is apparently mud
w[ith] Skoder. [Skoder] got into [a] run-in w[ith] another, unrelated Coppola
who submitted [a] letter to [the] ed[itor] regarding Pete West (I think), who
[Skoder] is on side of regarding [his] political aspirations. Coppola
(letter-writer)’s letter was misrepresented (?) [and] (because of this?) he
threatened VN [and] [Skoder] herself
[with a] lawsuit. Jeanne Straus ans[were]d [the] man personally, w[ith] copy of
letter showing no negative statement (about who?) as he’d thought. I don’t know
how the female Coppola is related to this other than by name similarity.
[This situation
can be explained in line with its rather farcical, entertaining quality. A
woman surnamed Coppola used to visit Jan in the office and they would
chat. Ms. Coppola had a convertible car and
seemed stylish…she seemed not a working stiff; maybe you could call her a bon
vivant of sorts (I saw her once or twice). Anyway, from what Jan said, Skoder
eventually blew up about the woman coming into the office so often, but the
issue wasn’t the woman’s gossiping interfering with work, it was some hypothesized
connection Skoder made between the Coppola and the septic-pumper contractor,
also surnamed Coppola, whom Skoder was eager to catch in the act of doing
illegal dumping. (This man had apparently threatened the VN with a lawsuit for defamation or such, as I alluded to in the
journal entry.) Now, one could make jokes about various Italian Americans in a
local area seeming related to each other, but Skoder’s making this connection
based simply on last name, with no other obvious “grounds for connection,”
seemed like not even very smart paranoia.
It apparently was this (among other possible nonsense) that helped Jan sum up
the weird environment around Skoder in the office as one of nerves-wearing
paranoia.]
[…]
Jan was at VN [one] year, [and] apparently
[Skoder’s] been there [two] years and seven months of so. But has been ed[itor]
less than that [actually, less than a year by August 1989, as I would find
later].
8. What (on August
18) set up my resigning (in September) (start)
[6893] [August
18] [Skoder] called [at] 10 this morning and had an angry (on her side) conversation with me. [So,
along with all else, she was a phone bully.] She found out I [had] talked w[ith]
Stan Martin [her boss] about [the possibility of] proofreading (related to
editing) at the paper. I told her the job [I looked into] was a general possibility related to all 5/6
of the Straus papers, although [as the phone conversation suggested] she seemed
to take [this job-seeking idea] as a sort of response mainly or predominantly
to her editing—[she said] “editing problems s[houl]d be discussed w[ith] me”
[and] “I do the editing.” [In all the
“annals” of editing banality I’ve witnessed over the years, this blowup of hers
is still striking for its pomposity, and all the more objectionable for her
age-30 GED of about five years before.] She said any editing questions s[houl]d go through her first [and] even
suggested that I s[houl]d have talked to her
first about any possib[ility] of a job generally unrelated or different from
simple VN stuff [such as I was
doing]. [In view of the millions of words of proofreading I would do within 20
years shortly after this, at nationally distributing publishers usually, and in
view of what became of her
career—with its lost jobs, lawsuits, and scorn of her among a wide number of
people in town—her pomposity and bluster in this August 18 situation is
breathtaking. Notably, there was one very brief stint I had in earlier 1989 at
a nationally distributing publisher, Prentice Hall’s Law and Business division,
at an office in Paramus—an odd little blip in
my editing career. It would turn out a range of people had passed through
there…a story for another time.] I told [Skoder] I’d already talked to J[eanne]
Straus [and] Stan about jobs out[side] of the VN—and even explained how I linked up w[ith] Straus so [Skoder]
w[oul]dn’t think I had gone to Straus knowingly [with an agenda, however valid]
to do something about her
[Skoder].—Anyway, at the end I started arguing [not heatedly, if I recall] that
I c[oul]dn’t have gone through [Skoder] first [and] limitedly to discuss a job
like the potential proofreader thing [i.e., this meaning partly for practical
reasons; Skoder wouldn’t have been in charge of whatever proofreading
possibility there was for all the papers], but [Skoder] said she c[oul]dn’t
talk long [ah, evasive, are we?]
bec[ause] she had to take her son [somewhere], etc. [S]o [as an observation I
certainly wouldn’t have made to her,] maybe I was getting uncomfortably close
to pointing out the limitations of her actual, defined authority.
She said she’s
“very disgruntled” [an interesting word choice]. She said this sort of
thing—what she contended was my going over her head—created “dissen[s]ion”
(between her [and] her employee? bad word usage? [actually, both, I would say today]). Jan left because
[said Skoder] “Jan lacked discretion.” [Ironic.] I will be taken off [the]
H[ea]lth B[oar]d coverage [Skoder said], which she [had] just put me on
yesterday [August 17]. She [Skoder] will also cover [the] Zon[in]g B[oar]d on
Aug. 25. I’m left w[ith] just [the] Plan[nin]g B[oar]d on Wed[nesday] [and] she
says she’ll see from there what she’ll do w[ith] me. She’d said (before this)
that what I did carries consequences. A vindictive, paranoid sort; paranoid
just as Jan had said. [And Jan and I would talk about this again.]
Stan Martin,
meanwhile, yesterday [August 17] said among other things that there was less a
premium on product quality [with] VN
than [with Straus’s] other papers bec[ause] it made the least [money].—Also
[he] said Jeanne Straus wanted (to [an] extent) something [long-term,
in-house?] for me.
[This was at
the end of the notebook. I won’t look into the subsequent notebook for more
entries; the rest of the situation I’ll write from memory and other sources.]
(to be continued)
##
End note 1. It
becomes darkly funny when you see by what facts you start to nail down some of
the specifics of this story, such as when Skoder got her GED. It is important
to be precise here, while realizing two things: (1) Skoder was not always so
careful with representing the complete set of relevant facts about an
individual she reported on, so she’s getting more consideration here than she often
gave others in her paid reporter work; and (2) if I’m a little off on
something, even giving a fact blog-style “soft focus” to help shield Skoder
from identification along with the pseudonym for her, that may not be a bad
thing, practically speaking, for the sake of preventing her from having a basis
for claiming this entry defames her.
But anyway: my facts on Skoder’s life history prior to her
work at The Vernon News came from a
few sources: two, I know, were (1) court papers I saw related to her 1993
lawsuit and possibly something from her 1996 lawsuit complaint, and (2) the verbal representations of GD, a former friend of hers with
whom I had a long conversation in 1998. I don’t have all my written records at
hand as I write this blog entry, but I find a passage from a novel draft where
I listed facts that, I believe, directly echoed Skoder’s facts, but they
surprise me in one or two regards. They say she moved to Vernon
Township from Bergen County
in 1984 (which seems accurate), but then that she got her GED in 1986, when she would have been about 34.
(But whether she got her GED at age 30 or 34, that still doesn’t speak
especially creditably of her.) But what’s even more remarkable: if she got her
GED in 1986, this was the year before she started working for The Vernon News, which I know was in
1987 (so she had the nerve to present herself to the paper as qualified to work
there despite just having gotten her GED, though working only as a photographer
at first—her news writing started in 1988). Moreover, her LinkedIn page (as
printed out in November 2012 and as viewed in early April 2013) says she
started doing “news writ[ing]” in 1986—which would be prior to, or about, the
time she got her GED! This rather takes the potential for women to be
pretentious about themselves in the work world to such an extreme that it is
really too extreme to be a good
reflector of women in general, even if you wanted to be a bit sardonic with the
generalization.
My novel passage also says she was born in 1952, though I’ve
been confused about whether she was born in 1953 or 1954. Suffice it to say
it’s around there. She also definitely had children before she got her GED.
Special Note. As
you’ve read this entry, you may have wondered if I would try to have Skoder
ousted from her current job, which appears to be with a nationally distributing
publisher. I have no interest in doing that. Nor would I encourage anyone else
to try to do that, based solely on my
blog entry here. What I am interested in is having known the disservice Skoder
has done to Vernon Township over about two decades, and in some sense I
hope she is satisfied enough with her current job that she doesn’t lose it and
thus have the itch to be a reporter in Vernon Township
again. In my opinion, no single person
has caused more damage to civic life in Vernon Township,
over so long a period, as has Skoder.
Might someone else—who has been “screwed” by Skoder in a set
of affairs wholly apart from anything I was ever in—be inspired by this blog
entry to get Skoder ousted from her current job? (Is such an ouster realistic?
Not to many of us, but to Skoder, quite possibly: it is not rare for her to
make such remarks as, in an opinion column of February 12, 2010, in a local
newspaper, “On the same public Internet forum, [X person] attacks this writer
with potentially defamatory statements that are allegedly [sic] aimed at interfering with this writer’s integrity and
livelihood.” This in a supposedly credible newspaper column.)
I do not expressly invite anyone who has read this, and who
knows who Skoder is, to try to get her removed from her current job, which in
any event is with a publisher that has nothing to do with local politics such
as Vernon Township’s. But I do want to add to discussion about Skoder, to the
extent it has existed (on informal levels); and I am sure there are people who
don’t need me to have encouragement to try, if they dared, to exact some
“comeuppance” for Skoder.
And I should add that, with all I report here, there are
probably many other colorful stories of her that I’ve never had the opportunity
to hear about. Moreover, not all the stories people have about her may jibe,
but that is somewhat beside the point; a lot of situations people have been in
with Skoder have been a matter of being personally assaulted by her, and in
these one-on-one situations, the victims’ having consensus with other people on
the matter is not integral (in fact) or necessary (in principle) to wanting,
and even having legal means, to get some proper retribution against her.
Defamation Check. Writing on someone like Skoder, who has
threatened lawsuits for defamation for so many years (even in the more complex,
defamation-wise, years of the Internet) can obviously make you leery of being
sued by her. But though no plan in this regard is ever airtight, I think the
way I do these entries is OK, along these lines:
* Only people in Vernon Township
and neighboring areas, who’ve known about Skoder, will know whom I’m talking
about. And what I have to say would square well enough, I think, with what many
numerous local people have said about her, many of whom I’ve never met.
* If she sued me for defamation,
then as a matter of course, her name would come out, as I offer evidence to
back up my statements, such as bylined items of hers, or local news items about
her, some going back to 1993 or thereabouts.
