Look who’s teaching now

Here’s a note to the next prospective college kid giving J-School an inkling of thought: Just don’t do it. Take up something different. Maybe try majoring in underwater basket weaving or simply changing your college tuition into small denominations of bills, fold them into little paper airplanes and toss them into the wind on a blustery day. At least then you’ll have the satisfaction of not wasting time cooped up in a lecture hall listening to some hack blather on about things they simply don’t know or understand.

Take for instance the fledgling journalism undergraduate program at the University at Albany. While there are some accomplished journalists taking the lectern, there are others that might just give you the wrong impression about reporting or writing a good story. In fact, Albany’s newest part-time lecturer might just leave you in the classroom to figure it out for yourself while she goes out to get her nails done.

That’s right, esteemed beautician and housewife extraordinaire Barbara Lombardo has apparently taken a spot guest lecturing at UAlbany. Lombardo, who sometimes doubles as the managing editor of the Saratogian, clearly has time on her hands with the quality of product now being released from the Lake Avenue newsroom. It’s not like she has a whole staff of rookie journalists over there that could benefit from some coaching; or a Web design that’s gone dreadfully wrong.

Sarcasm aside, Lombardo is about the last editor in the region -perhaps even the state -who should be teaching cub reporters how to pass muster in the go get‘em field of modern journalism. Everything about her writing suggests the type of recalcitrance grown only after a journalist has fully abandoned all the principals and tools of their trade.

Lombardo does make a stab or two at giving the trade a go with her weekly -or is it monthly -column in the paper’s life section. But the end result is a domestic living piece that shows how utterly bloodless and behind the times she’s become. Then with the Saratogian’s redesign, she made another go at modern column writing in the so far ill-fated “fresh ink” blog. Perhaps a better title would be “ dried ink hopelessly crusted to the well.”

But were there an example of why Lombardo shouldn’t be teaching anything, much less fledgling reporters, it would be her latest blog entry detailing the editor’s thought process as a fire raged on Grand Avenue. Instead of racing to work and grabbing hold of the first pad-toting pen jockey she could find -or going out to the fire herself -Lombardo did what any entrenched editor would do: She took to the phone.

Let’s try to forget the fire was within walking distance of the Saratogian offices. And let’s also give Lombardo a bit of a break because she was her “first day back to work after several days off.” But seriously, when news breaks, she should at least have a mechanism in line to get the job done. This mechanism happened to be the Web editor, who apparently has a better grasp on covering breaking news than his boss. Before Lombardo could make another round of fruitless phone calls, the fellow was charging out to the fire, as she explains in hyperlink-free Dried Ink.

Students, this is what your tuition is paying for: Stories about how the Web editor, photographer and circulation department worker demonstrated how useless a so-called managing editor is with a small-sized daily newspaper. In contrast to whatever she might lecture about, Lombardo’s newsroom does offer prospective journalists an interesting opportunity to learn, albeit without much of safety net.

Judging by the Saratogian’s quality, there doesn’t appear to be much help or guidance in Lombardo’s newsroom. Reporters are taught the ropes by being thrown up against them. And in some cases, that’s the best way to learn. The key to reporting lost sometime after the days of Woodward and Bernstein and amid the days of the information-age revolution was the type of boots-on-the-ground beat-stomping work of bygone days; the time when there were blue-collar reporters and not the pseudo-intellectual white collar shills of today.