A paper driven by clueless editors

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The clueless assignment editors really had reporters for The Record of Woodland Park chasing a bunch of interesting but ultimately irrelevant stories, as today's paper clearly shows.

The former Hackensack daily long has been editor-driven and too few of  the reporters are independent enough to come up with their own ideas or even have the ability to re-wirte their own stories. The rest need a lot of hand-holding by the assignment editors, who are under the overbearing Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, head of the local news assignment desk.

Last night, I was enjoying free-range Australian lamb chops with a couple of glasses of shiraz for dinner when I looked at the clock and had an unpleasant flashback to the many nights I spent on the news copy desk, listening to shrieks of laughter from Sykes echoing across the Hackensack newsroom. Such long-suffering layout editors as Ron Meyer, Randy Splaingard and Jim "Corny" Cornelius could only keep their heads down.

Looking at today's front page, I wonder whether Assignment Editor Dan Sforza, who was promoted by Sykes after doing a mediocre job as transportation reporter, had one of the current transportation reporters, Tom Davis, go to the small airport in Atlantic City to do a story on a security system some say would work at Newark Liberty (logo appears above).

The story -- full of nothing more concrete than shoulds, woulds and coulds -- takes up most of the front page. Yet, Sforza and Davis have been too lazy to do a story about the shabby local bus system so many North Jersey residents have to contend with. When the rear brakes started screeching on new NJ Transit buses used on routes to Manhattan, then-transportation reporter Sforza couldn't be bothered to do a story. He preferred to write about "highways of the future." What a disgrace.

Two Record reporters worked on the Page 1 story about the pilot of a small plane who died along with four others in a Monmouth County crash. He was from Lodi, but does that justify all this coverage? Did I miss a story on the dismal safety record of these annoyingly noisy small planes and what, if anything, the federal government and manufacturers are doing about it?

These two front-page "wonders" forced the incompetent editors to bury on Page A-8 a story about the brutal French colonization and rape of Haiti, and a crippling embargo that sounds a lot like what the U.S. did in nearby Cuba after that island gained independence.

The commuting reporter, Road Warrior John Cichowski, has another driver-oriented column on the front of Local today, in a section without any municipal, development or education news about Hackensack, Englewood and Teaneck, the three most diverse towns in Bergen County. (Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, was puulled off her beat to work on the air crash story.)

Teaneck reporter Joseph Ax has his first byline today on a so-called local story since returning from Haiti, but a visit to Teaneck High by ethically-challenged Sen. Bob Menedez isn't local news by any stretch of the imagination, despite what Ax's desperate assignment editor said.