Friday, February 25, 2011

'Bergen Beat' or beating Bergen?

Seal of Bergen County, New JerseyImage via Wikipedia


The Web site of The Record and other publications of North Jersey Media Group now has a blog about Bergen County. 

I don't know how much of the information reporters post at northjersey.com appears in the Woodland Park daily. Here is an editor's note on the blog:

Bergen Beat

Welcome to Bergen Beat, a place where reporters from The Record will post information from the towns they cover and insights from the streets of Bergen County. We hope that you will take some time and interact with the reporters who cover your world.
Daniel Sforza
Assistant Director of Assignment/Bergen
Posted by Dan Sforza on 01/04 at 06:44 PM
(0) CommentsPermalink

You would think "insights from the streets" would show up in the paper. And I take exception to Sforza saying "reporters who cover your world," because that is so far from the truth.

Sforza is a former reporter who covered transportation and Englewood before that, but he was no great shakes.

On the Englewood beat, he apparently wasn't aware that an open-air police firing range awakened residents with gunshots and shotgun blasts as early as 8 a.m. more than 100 days each year. 

When he covered transportation, he ignored defective NJ Transit cruiser buses on commuter routes to Manhattan, and wrote stories about the "highway of the future."

Sforza works under head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, a former weekly newspaper reporter who has been at the paper forever in one guise or another.

Local news coverage has diminished in direct proportion to their inability -- and the inability of other assistant assignment editors -- to send reporters out to cover stories that have meaning to readers in Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other communities.

The assignment editors are supposed to keep abreast of the news. Instead, at least one of them, Rich Whitby, merely stares at breasts in the newsroom.

Bergen Beat
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5 comments:

  1. You gotta lay off the personal attacks on your web site. It sounds like you have a personal vendetta against these people, when most of them, as far as I can tell, have done nothing to you at all.

    You come across as very mean. It gives little or no validity to your site.

    You're just a bitter old man who likes to get his rocks off by bashing others.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anyway, I don't consider a personal attack pointing out that someone got promoted to assignment editor after doing a poor job as a reporter.

    I'm just stating what happened, and giving you an insight into The Record system.

    You also say the people I write about "have done nothing to you at all."

    You would have had to work in the Hackensack newsroom to even try to guess at that, and even if you did, you wouldn't know about all the interactions.

    So stop blowing smoke.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah, so you're really just venting decades of accumulated vindictiveness? And we have to take your word that you were always right and all of these other people were always wrong? Pardon me for wondering whether you're blowing smoke up your own stovepipe.

    ReplyDelete

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