A valuable lesson for all

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The danger of promising education coverage "every day," as The Record of Woodland Park has been doing for a few years, is not delivering and alienating readers, some of whom just stop reading the paper.

In the Local section today, we learn that a city of Passaic educator has applied for a grant to give every sixth-grader a laptop. A second education story was supplied by the Star-Ledger and doesn't mention Bergen, Passaic or Morris counties, The Record's circulation area.

My son is in his third year of attending public school in Hackensack, and I do not recall seeing any stories about his schools since we moved here in August 2007. Oh, wait. Isn't that the approximate time Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, has been sidetracked on an inane, interminable investigation championed by her boss, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes?

Has any Hackensack educator applied for a grant to give laptops to sixth- or seventh-graders in Hackensack, the former home of The Record?

The rest of the Local section has no news about Hackensack, unless you count volunteers who spruced up Friendship House in the city, or about Teaneck, Englewood, Ridgewood, Westwood or a host of other Bergen towns.

The so-called "Newstracker" feature at the bottom of L-1 inexplicably looks ahead to the sentencing of a Paterson man who killed his distant cousin. Yet, Saturday's paper didn't report any sentencings in the criminal courts of Bergen, Passaic or Morris counties -- even though Friday is sentencing day in Superior Court.

So was no one sentenced or did The Record's editors keep those stories out of the paper, as they have in the past, so there wouldn't be so much crime news to upset readers?

A Paterson woman who died in an arson fire made front-page news today, but I'll bet that was only because the editors got a spectacular photo of a non-fatal fire in another town they could run above the fold.

The features section called Better Living (not Better Eating) has the usual tips on how to carve a turkey today, but the paper has been silent so far on the merits of finding a turkey that was raised naturally, without antibiotics and animal by-products, or one that hasn't been bred to have a broad breast of tasteless white meat.