Readers fight to survive

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"Charter schools fight to survive."

"Libraries feel pinch."

These headlines in The Record of Woodland Park today easily could have read: " Readers fight to survive" and "Readers feel pinch."

The more the lazy, incompetent editors ignore the diversity of Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other towns, the more readers find the paper irrelevant to their lives.

Even the stories they do run often are incomplete or superficial -- evidence that head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and her sub-editors don't know anything about the 70 towns in Bergen County or simply don't care.

For example, the Page 1 story on charter schools doesn't say much about the Englewood initiative or why there aren't more charter schools there, given that city's segregated public elementary and middle schools. The Wayne library is featured in the story about funding on the front of Local, but there little detail about Hackensack or other Bergen libraries. And the L-1 story on Lyndhurst's downtown only serves to highlight the absence of stories about Hackensack's downtown, among others. (Photo: Church on the Green, Hackensack.)

When he took over in 2006, Publisher Stephen A. Borg ordered the desperate editors to institute daily education and food coverage -- even though everyone knew that was just hype and nothing of the sort happened -- but he forgot all about the paper's mission: local news. And so have the reporters and editors.