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. For Part 1 to this entry’s Part 2, see here. Subpart A for
this entry’s subpart C is here. Edits done 4/17/13, including link fixed between asterisks. Another edit, 5/1/13, with important link, between plus-signs. Another edit 5/4/13.]
Subsections below:
8. What (on August
18) set up my resigning (in September) (cont’d)
9. The effect of Skoder’s notorious tenure on the prospects of VN
10. Notable points in Skoder’s “career” after the VN
11. A thumbnail sketch of how Skoder did her
slanted reporting: giving sides black and white hats
8. What (on August 18) set up my resigning (in September) (cont’d)
What is strange about how Skoder
imposed “consequences,” after she had the August 18 phone exchange with me, is
that she didn’t even do anything decisive—or anything at all. I think that
after she took some board meetings out of my hands, there was some remaining
meeting I was to cover, and suddenly she called and left a message that she
would take that meeting, too. In effect, I had no work. But I wasn’t officially
fired. Skoder was incommunicado for days and days.
I hung in a sort of limbo for
about two weeks. Was I getting no more work? What was it my place to do? After
all her bluster, of course, you felt as if you were backed into a kind of weird
corner. As I was desperate for income, this situation was all the more morally
and emotionally troubling. So it should come as no surprise that I eventually
wrote a letter to Skoder’s superior, Jeanne Straus, c.c.’ing Stan Martin, announcing
I was resigning, and I took the opportunity to criticize Skoder directly, and
roundly, as I didn’t do when having on an earlier, August day spoken with Stan Martin (and, though I’m
not sure, with Straus). (In the earlier dealings, I was more practical,
sticking to narrower issues, and with an eye to getting a different kind of
work with the company.)
I think, all things considered,
and since I was new to dealing with Skoder’s kind of “professionalism,” my
letter about her was well-done on a troubling topic. As I’d learned to do, when
dealing with such high-handedness and emotional instability as posed by Skoder
(or any other such overweening superior), you took the most measured approach
you could in writing a criticism amid a resignation, or the like, even if you
did opt to be incisive about (some of) the person’s faults. (On her education,
see End note 1.)
Well, the powers that be at
Straus Communications forwarded the letter to Skoder, and she fired back at me
with her five-page, single-spaced rant that ended with a threat to sue. (Coworker
Jan also elected, probably after consulting her conscience as I had done mine,
to send a similar letter to mine to Skoder’s superiors, and Jan also got a
single-spaced rant from Skoder as a result, this one only three pages.)
Anyone who thinks I spill an awful lot of beans about these
work messes should realize that even with this blog I hold some information in
reserve, to be decent or just not overload a story with too many gory details.
I still have the September 1989 letter from Skoder—it is a marvel of
injudicious “response to me from a work superior.” If anyone was still doubtful
about whether Skoder had a screw loose, a direct copy of this letter posted
online would remove all doubt (though I don’t intend to post it). I haven’t,
actually, read the letter in some years. But it’s the sort of thing that, when
you review it again, you don’t know which you’re struck by more: (1) the awful
way it is composed, with errors, crazily expansive sentences suggestive of
limited education, emotional bluster—really, signs of frank instability; (2)
the fact that someone could think they could handle a professional issue this
way; or (3) the sheer personal aspect of being subjected to such a letter
(which you tend to get over with age and experience).
It was sometime after I’d sent my letter, and maybe after
Jan had sent hers, that the two of us spoke on the phone, trading notes on
Skoder like two who had just witnessed something half paranormal. We were both
in agreement, she as a licensed psychologist (who had before and/or would again
work for the state) and I as a recent graduate with one major in psychology
(and taking a more literary route with psychology), that Skoder showed signs of
clinical paranoia. (I would be in touch with Jan again in 1999, in the wake of
Skoder’s 1998 gross intrusion on my rights regarding the Vernon Township Environmental
Commission.)
9. The effect of Skoder’s notorious tenure on the prospects of VN
To get back a bit to Skoder’s
career arc at VN, she was editor
there for about two years. She was fired in June 1991. I
never knew what set this off, though there were claims she made about the
situation in a lawsuit she filed concerning the firing in 1993 (though she
alleged some defendants included a number of businesspeople and one or more
town government representatives, and even Eugene Mulvihill was named as a codefendant;
in Skoder’s weirdly amateurish legal papers, one page of which I have a copy
of, Mulvihill is listed and his participation is described in the larger set of
allegations she makes, though someone crossed his information out, maybe on
Skoder’s sudden decision not to name him).
So here you had a situation
where both Jan and I complained about Skoder in 1989, on matters that suggested
Skoder was rather grossly out of bounds in how she was editing the paper. Now
consider that when Straus Communications bought the paper (see my thumbnail
sketch of the Straus businesses and public service in subpart A), the
only way VN had any reputation and
substance was due to the sensational radium-soil issue in Vernon Township of
1986. Skoder was at first only a photographer there, or not much more, in 1987.
Even if Skoder did a lot of reporting for the paper in 1988, she was made
editor in 1989 with limited education and even not very extensive news writing
experience. Then it seemed to take a number of underworkers (as well as
outsiders such as town officials who had objected to her reporting style) complaining
about her—I don’t know if Chris Rohde also complained—before Skoder was fired
in 1991.
After Jan and I had left in late
summer 1989, I think Skoder had a hard time getting new reporters. I recall
that the paper often looked as if Skoder was the only one writing it—though it
would eventually have a policy where if only one writer did all the articles on
a page, only one or two of the articles on the page would have bylines, and the
rest wouldn’t, presumably to dispel the suggestion the paper was written by one
person. But as I recall, when Skoder was its editor, she usually didn’t
hesitate to have her byline on every article she did.
In the meantime, the paper (understandably)
got a bad reputation in town, for slanted reporting. Skoder’s style of favoring
one clique of Republicans over another was so recognizable (see subsection 11
below on Skoder’s methods), and shaped her reporting so “reliably,” that this
style was clearly evident when she worked for a paper called the Highland Times in 1994, and for the Argus edition of The Suburban Trends from about 1996 until late 2000. (One of my
entries on a 1998 set of incidents on my other blog suggests Skoder started at the Argus in 1992, but I’m not sure about
that.)
Meanwhile, I think the
reputation of The Vernon News was so
damaged by Skoder’s tenure in 1989-91 that it never really recovered. It had a
succession of different editors from 1991 on (see End note 2)—and finally it was closed down by Straus, essentially
folded into a more regional newspaper (which had already existed) called The Advertiser News. Today there are two
editions of this latter paper, one “North” (covering Vernon Township and other
nearby municipalities) and one “South” (covering southern Sussex County areas
and nearby parts of Morris County). This is the typical kind of “community
newspaper” that is largely an advertising
vehicle but also contains news items—some by bylined stringer reporters and
some merely reproductions of press releases. It is a beefier “community
newspaper” than some of North Jersey Newspapers’ equivalents that serve nearby
areas, which have a formulaic approach and talk of whose character I will defer
here. Suffice it to say the NJN local papers are less substantial (certainly in
number of pages) than is The Advertiser
News.
I should also add that Vernon Township
would be a hard municipality to have its own newspaper—even if it was capably
edited—simply due to economics: it takes a lot, in terms of advertising mostly,
to financially float such a paper. I think the fact that the multi-municipality
Advertiser News, with its heavy
reliance on ads, has lasted much longer than did The Vernon News helps convey this simple economical fact.
Anyway, Skoder was lucky to get
the chance to do news reporting that she did early in her time at VN, given her limited education and
news-writing experience. And her having some of us writers work there for a
brief (and sometimes rather stormy) time did give us some career-helping
opportunity of a kind (though, as I said, two things that stand out from this
engagement were the memory-informing blowup I had with Skoder and the fact of
virtually unusable writing samples).
10. Notable points in
Skoder’s “career” after the VN
One could point out that Skoder showed some initiative and
hard work, and even some talent, in not only getting her college degree (in
1996, I believe), but in teaching (as an adjunct professor) at one or two local
community colleges, and in teaching at public schools and even doing editorial
work for a nationally distributing publisher of educational materials. But what
remains striking, which goes far beyond my little story of the 1989 mess, is
the cost: in her dealings with others,
whether this involved her uncomplimentary news reporting on those she didn’t politically
favor, or her head-butting or the like with some people more directly (I heard
she was dreaded by school staff when it was parent-teacher–conference time at
the public schools where her children went), she exacted a cost in terms of
aspects of others’ careers, or at least in their ill will as a natural result
of her inordinately contentious behavior. This is in a way that inevitably makes
you wonder (at very least) whether her career couldn’t have been pursued more
peaceably and with more common-sense respect for others’ rights.
Every young woman I’ve worked with closely at publishers
(let’s just take the 1990s, when by and large my most honest publishing work
was)—“Lori” at AAC, Lauren at CPG, Maria at North Jersey Newspapers, Frances T.
at Prentice Hall School (an educational publisher), and others—whether there
were times that I butted heads with them (not with all), were hurt by them, or
whatever else—stood head and shoulders above Skoder along a simple dimension: they pursued their careers, finishing high
school and college on time, and working their hearts out at early jobs, on the
basis of their achievements, their show of talent, and their working generally quite
capably with others, not on how “well” they could ding the next guy with
“investigative reporting,” or how ferociously they could act on some view that another
person had done them irreparably wrong and thus had to pay stiff consequences,
whether in a lawsuit or a non-legalistic vindictive move against the person’s
career.
When summing the longer-range “career” of a person as
slovenly and manic in her exploits as is Skoder, it’s a little hard to be
succinct, but a few tastes will be illustrative.
* [Suing Straus et
al.] She filed a lawsuit against The Vernon News and/or Straus
Communications, local businessman Mark Nelson (who had been a Vernon councilman
and mayor), and others—originally including Gene Mulvihill, while he was later
crossed off the list of her defendants in her weirdly formatted, pro se
lawsuit. She alleged loss of her job, defamation, conspiracy, and a host of
other things all tied to her loss of the VN
job in 1991. (One sentence in the lawsuit complaint starts with “Me, and…” as a
compound subject; it talks about her and a “representative” of The Star-Ledger going to the municipal
building to check a quote of hers against a tape of a meeting, and “The
comments [of another] were verbatim as I had quoted them in the paper.” Another
sentence refers to a defendant this way: “He was formerly employed by me [as if
she owned the company?] as a
freelance reporter [i.e., a grossly underpaid stringer] but I let him go when I
discovered he was a close personal friend of then Mayor [name dedacted] and was
becoming too biased and irrational in his news reporting.”) This lawsuit was
eventually dismissed, I believe in 1994, apparently due to Skoder’s failure to
prosecute it.
* [Working for a
short-lived startup.] She worked for
an upstart newspaper, The Highland Times,
in 1994, including as letters to the editor letters from her circle of
friends at the time. Some of these, I was told, were forged by her. In any
event, her biased/opinionated reporting style was clear.
* [Using a pseudonym
for letters to the editor.] She used
a fake name to write letters to the New
Jersey Herald, using a version of her sister’s name—an exploit that seems
cited by Internet commenters on her even today. The Herald in December 1995 included an editorial note, by the
associate editor who was in charge of the editorial page, on the issue of
Skoder’s using a fake name, when the paper’s suspicions were aroused. (I showed
this item to my boss NR in 1998, as I recounted on my other blog in this entry from November 21—see long indented note toward the end.) +[Update: Here (512 KB file) is a link to a pdf of the December 1995 Herald editorial note, with Skoder's and her family members' names and address/phone information blacked out (redacting has accidentally covered some periods in the last paragraph of the first column, hence it may read slightly oddly). This is probably my favorite piece of evidence of Skoder's less-than-professional moves over the years. I don't know whether, at this time in 1995, she was doing stringer-reporting work for a newspaper--whether The Star-Ledger (as surely she would do later)--or the Argus (which definitely seems to have been underway within 1996).]+
* [Her surreptitiously
tape-recording phone interviews even offended a charismatic local community
leader.] Skoder used to be a big one
(I assume she used to do this, i.e.,
she no longer does this) for recording interviews she had with someone else on
the phone, without the person’s knowledge/permission. One person she did this
with—because I heard about it from him—was Howard Burrell, a longtime Vernon
Township resident who served for years on the Board of Education, and ran for
township committee (or council) three times and won in 1995 and 1997 (I was
part of the many-individual group that helped get him elected in 1995); this
made him the first Black man to be elected to Vernon Township’s
committee/council in its history. He was also elected to the county Board
of Chosen Freeholders in 1999—the first Black man to sit there. He has been a
church elder/trustee or such. He has long had charisma in town and respect as
an unusual, exemplary man, not simply as an advocate of a particular ethnic
group (this is not a slap; it partly reflects that Sussex County,
for better or worse, is about 95 percent white). Once Skoder tried to
tape-record him on the phone, and he caught wise to it, and upbraided her about
it in confident terms.
* [She sues a raft of
former friends.] Skoder filed
another lawsuit, in 1996, against six former friends, including GD whom I
mentioned above. This suit dragged on for four years, and was finally dismissed
in 2000, after a proof hearing in which, apparently, Skoder tried to have
something misrepresented about her current (2000) work status, I believe her
stringer work with The Star-Ledger
(see subsection 11).
(It was around this time I was in my alienated, tortured
relations with North Jersey Newspapers, sending communications of various sorts…with
this whole “lost-soul” thing primarily set up by my boss’s mishandling of
Skoder’s assault at the February 1998 Environmental Commission meeting. And it
was after Skoder was dropped from the Argus
in about late 2000 that she saw fit to glower at my mother at the post office
[see subpart A].)
* [Her taking over an
esteemed community group chases away earnest young potential members who had
been with the group before, but are well familiarized with Skoder.] In about 2006, she inveighed to become the
head of a township volunteer group, not really a governmental body, that has a
particular, significant role in town. Two young women I knew, who had been
involved with the group in the past, abruptly decided no longer to be involved
with the group—they were in their early twenties or so—because they knew what
Skoder was about and decided to leave it before even crossing paths with
Skoder, feeling the group would be tainted by her running it. (A similar
situation, of young being scared off from involvement in an idealistic,
volunteer group by the unprofessional behavior of an elder, I have seen
elsewhere, not involving Skoder.)
* [Skoder’s journalistic
crocodile jaws are active even in 2010.] In an opinion column in a February 12, 2010,
newspaper—a small, mostly-advertising thing, produced by North Jersey
Newspapers—that Skoder was able to work for, her crocodile jaws were wrapped around,
among others, one Austin Carew. Mr. Carew had been a fellow Board of Health
member with me in 1997, so it was especially disturbing to me when he sided
very staunchly against me in early 1998 on the official newspaper issue when we
were all trying to get the township Environmental Commission going, and he was
new to that body (see this blog entry recounting some of
this situation). He couldn’t disagree more with how I handled the matter of
Skoder’s newspaper improperly being an official newspaper of the commission.
While I was offended by his attitude on this, I felt on some level that he
would see the light about Skoder.
As it happened, always a cordial enough sort, in years after
1998 he would greet me in a chipper way when we met in town. He is a local
businessman who looks a little like an elf. So imagine how ridiculous it would
be for Skoder to eventually paint him as some kind of gross reprobate when,
after he had been elected mayor in town, he had fallen grievously in her
estimation and was subject to her poisoned journalistic pen.
Skoder’s 2010 newspaper pillorying of him (the particular
one I’m considering, among what were numerous others; I just found there was
some similar incident in 2002!) related
to an issue she raised about an e-mail, from then Environmental Commission
chair Craig Williams (whom I’ve also known sketchily) to numerous other
officials, which was posted to an Internet site: she remarks, “That [Gary] Gray
[a former councilman] and [Austin] Carew [former mayor at the time] would
respond to everyone copied on the e-mail distribution list by stating the
information is factual and accurate is pretty shocking, and one could easily
perceive it as politically motivated or even allegedly [!] intended to
intimidate and mislead. That Carew would do such a thing amid charges of
alleged RICO activity against him by a fellow councilman is disturbing.” There
were no “charges” against Carew, if this is to suggest a criminal sense; Carew was named in a RICO-referencing lawsuit,
filed by Richard Carson, a township councilman, which was a civil matter. This suit was eventually settled, with
an anticlimactic outcome; the January 14, 2011, New Jersey Herald reported that the township settled with plaintiff Carson to the tune of $45,000, but with the stipulation that "no sides admit to any wrongdoing" (p. A-1). Carew, who was a former mayor in 2011, is quoted in the article as saying of the settlement "It's a travesty" and "It is so ridiculously bogus" (p. A-1).
Suffice it to say that Carew, who had sided against me when Skoder wrapped her
crocodile jaws around me in 1998, had his turn in the crocodile jaws by 2010. I
felt rather badly for him at this point, with my offense at him over 1998
basically past. (A possible future “Appendix” to this set of entries on the
1989 mess may talk a bit about some 2002 matters involving Carew and Skoder,
very interesting in the overall context here.)
* [Skoder has
extensive and ill-advised e-mailing relationship with an ally, a township
mayor.] In early 2011, the New Jersey Herald did a big exposé story
about how Skoder and the mayor at the time, Sally R., were trading e-mails on a
host of township business—Skoder was only on the Land Use Board (the successor
to both the Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Adjustment); Skoder was not
an elected official (as was Sally
R.), and Skoder sure as hell wasn’t an attorney. Skoder’s e-mails in responding
to things Sally informed her on included her trademark opinionatedness, and
such advice as “Tell her this…” and spouting (not on the same issue) “This is
fraud and we will sue!” One had a hard time telling which was worse—the way
Skoder was insinuated into township business like a spectacularly ill-chosen
(and presumptuous) “counselor,” or the coarseness
of her opinions she gave in e-mails. Sally R. was not reelected mayor later
that year; this story about her cozy relationship with Skoder appears to have
been one reason why. (This 2011 situation was referred to in *this blog entry from late last November*, in the subsection headed “The township
attorney drops the ball.”)
11. A thumbnail sketch of how Skoder did her
slanted reporting: giving sides black and white hats
Skoder had two phases in her
newspaper career—when she was an editor at The
Vernon News (which was 1989-91; her previous work there did not mean she
was an editor), and her stringer-reporting work, which started around 1993 and
went, with maybe some breaks, until the mid-2000s. In her news reporting work,
she worked, most voluminously, for small papers—the Highland Times, a startup that quickly went out of business (her
tenure there was mainly 1994, I think); the Argus
edition of The Suburban Trends (her
tenure from about 1996 to about 2000 [strangely, my draft of the 1998 matters
detailed on my other blog suggests she started with the Argus in 1992]); and AIM
Vernon (from about 2009 to about 2011—I could be off in dates, but she
didn’t write for AIM too long, and
her work was largely writing an opinion column). The latter two papers were
owned by North Jersey Newspapers; that company wanted marketing inroads into
Sussex County, and tried to do this with the Argus, but this effort failed about 13 years ago (the Argus was eventually discontinued in
about 2003, after Skoder had been released from it in late 2000, though of
course The Suburban Trends, covering
a much larger—and mainly Passaic County—area, remains).
How did AIM Vernon start? There were originally one or two AIM newspapers, largely an advertising
vehicle for exurban areas, that served a few municipalities in the Passaic
County/Morris County area abutting watershed and such lands. They were owned by
a small businessman; eventually, as it had apparently done with other small
local papers over the years, NJN bought up the AIM titles, adding it to their huge stable of multi-county municipality-serving
papers, and they added a few editions serving other local areas. One edition
was AIM Vernon, which is freely
distributed by mail, and this was the only local paper Skoder ended up writing
for after some hiatus from local news reporting.
Notably, Skoder also did
un-bylined stringer reporting for The Star-Ledger
(just as even I had done briefly in spring 1989); she did this for quite a few
years, starting in about 1996, ending (I’m not sure) in about 2003—but this
almost always meant covering municipal meetings and wasn’t too much different
in some broad ways from the bylined municipal-meeting stories done for small
local papers. With such a “gig,” you didn’t have the profile that a byline
would confer (and this also reflected, in some sense, your status or background
as a reporter), but one good thing about it, as I recall from 1989, is that it
paid more per story than did writing for the small local papers. (The Star-Ledger basically doesn’t do
this stringer thing now, as far as I can see, because of post-2008 economics
and the Internet’s eroding newspaper readership.)
Even if I am off as to some
details here, I think this is a fair accounting of Skoder’s tracks in the
local-newspaper arena over about 20 years. It should be noted that a reporter
can take this kind of career route and not necessarily be a bad reporter. It
may be a matter of choice why one would pursue a reporting career this way; for
some women, for example, it may be a good way to work while also raising a
young family at home.
But Skoder—who was complained
about regarding her reporting even while, as far as I know, she wrote for The Star-Ledger—had a certain general
tendency in how she reported, which I’ll sketch here.
Skoder would defend herself—as
she certainly did one time with me, in the 1998 Environmental Commission
fracas—to the effect that she could get accurate quotes. But this wasn’t the
main problem when her reporting was slanted. A lot of the problem was simple
judgment, and being complete enough to be fair in a story.
Let’s take a schematic, hypothetical
example (actual examples can be offered, but if I did that, I might be
revealing who Skoder is, and I’m doing her the courtesy of not revealing her
identity, beyond Sussex
County). Say a developer,
whom some believe to be “too cozy” with some township officials, wants to build
an apartment building of sorts—fitting in with local architecture—to meet
guidelines of what in this state is called “Mount Laurel housing,” or housing,
following a decades-old court case, that is to meet a need determined by the
case for each municipality to provide a certain amount of local-income housing.
(This case in itself is complicated—I first heard about it in 1987—and I won’t
go into its complexities and nuances here.)
Say the developer appears before
the township Zoning Board because it needs a variance for, I don’t know,
building height in the zone in which the apartment building is planned for. Say
some citizens—aligned with one or two local board members, like the chair,
Arlene H. (to take what would today be a fictional example), who don’t
particularly warm to the developer’s overall intentions and/or track record in
town—want to have the project’s variance denied. Say their issue generally is
that the apartment building would block the view of a local hillside/gorge
people like to see.
Now, say a lawyer for the
developer speaks in a hearing before the Zoning Board. I will put some words in
boldface for a reason; will explain soon.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the
attorney says, “my client appreciates the need to provide low-income housing
for people in Vernon according to the Mount Laurel guidelines, and we have
acknowledged that, as a large developer in town, we are well positioned to
accept the tradeoff [there is a system of credits, or such, involved with
private developers’ squaring with Mount Laurel guidelines; leave an explanation
of that aside] of building this housing amid our other projects. But we also have to do what is economically
feasible for us, and the height of this building, while obscuring the gorge, is
more economical for us than building many lower buildings on the same lot.”
An opponent, “Mary Lou Joslin”
(a fictional person for our purposes), in turn says: “Board, I understand the
issue about Mount
Laurel housing too, but we feel it would be a tragedy to have this
building obscure the viewshed of the gorge, which has been an asset in town so
long.”
Skoder would report the boldface
stuff, making the developer look less agreeable to the public (she was usually
against what could be called the “business Republican” policies in Vernon Township),
and making the opponent look more like a white knight:
“The
developer’s attorney said, ‘We have to do what is economically feasible for us,
and the height of this building, while obscuring the gorge, is more economical
for us than building many lower buildings on the same lot.’
“Mary Lou
Joslin [fictional person] of the [fictional] Save Our Vernon group said, ‘We
feel it would be a tragedy to have this building obscure the viewshed of the
gorge, which has been an asset in town so long.’”
Subtlety would be left out. The
two sides would look as if they had black and white hats. (And if Skoder was
contested on how she reported the meeting, she could fire back that her quotes
were accurate.)
Patty Paugh, a local reporter
for The Star-Ledger for some years,
who had earlier worked for Sussex County’s New
Jersey Herald, might seem to favor the side against the developer too
(especially if, in real life, the developer was Great American Recreation), but
she also very typically reported more of the original quotes, to give some
sense of complexity on both sides, and to show both sides had a brain.
Skoder’s way of making one side
(which she would favor, which became clear in her opinion pieces done over the
years) look virtuous far above the other side not only was, to me, so obvious
in her reporting, but it’s amazing how little this method changed over the
years.
##
As they say, it takes all kinds to make a world, but some
kinds make you want to run for your bunker, or carry brass knuckles.
##
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 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.
End note 2. I
think that, in a way, the conditions in 1989-92 for producing The Vernon News were so draconian that
it was difficult for just about any editor, though Skoder foundered as she did largely
due to her own lack of qualifications. A Tina Halsted took the reins from about
July 1991 to December 1991, and did not seem to have the upper management’s
full support. Then a Cass Vanzi, who had had experience at a major New York newspaper as
well as other venues, took over in January 1992. Cass lasted at least a year or
so. I worked for different times under both women; one way to measure how
things went is that the percentages of articles with minor or major editing
problems, followed by the percentages of OK-edited articles, piece out this
way: Skoder, 77%, 22%; Tina, 50%, 50%; Cass (who didn’t know a lot of
presuppositions about Vernon life to handle editing of the stories well), 60%,
40%. I thought Tina was the best, for me, but she tended not to cut down longer
stories, as I expected her to do.
And
in Skoder fashion, when I returned to The
Vernon News in September 1991 to supplement my work at All American Crafts,
Skoder (fired from the VN months
before) went into action and tried to have her ally Arlene Holbert raise issues
about the quality of my articles, which machinations Tina caught wise to to
some extent, though she felt more annoyance at Holbert (as to her
pushiness/tone) than she did to Skoder—she didn’t fully have the picture on
Skoder yet. (See this entry, “The place of
Skoder in my war stories, Part 1 of 2, ” in the subsection titled “A taste of the 1998 assault-phase stuff, including telling
exhibits,” toward the end—referencing Tina Halsted—on the 1991 Vernon News situation, where the editor,
Tina, defended me.)
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.
* Defamation law requires, among other things, a
determination of whether a statement is factually correct. On many of my
significant points, I have hard-copy evidence. On points where I have only
statements by others to back me up, I could either (a) say that, instead of
hearsay, it’s a matter of direct testimony from me about a conversation I had
with another, or (b) omit the offending “heard from another” statement, and it
still wouldn’t invalidate the bulk of my entries falling under “Fraud in the
Caymans…Part 2.”
