Sunday, April 24, 2011

A rare nod to our senior citizens

PET scan of a human brain with Alzheimer's diseaseImage via Wikipedia
A brain scan of a human with Alzheimer's disease.

Several years after Editor Francis Scandale took over at The Record, readership started falling. His response was to tailor news coverage to 20-year-olds in what turned out to be a failed strategy for attracting new readers.

But his affection for 20- and 30-year-olds continues as he and other editors give the back of their hands to older workers and older readers.

They replaced the food editor with a young, inexperienced man; routinely ignore the challenges facing elderly drivers and run far more stories on autism than on Alzheimer's disease.

So today's lively, Page 1 story on two North Jersey residents who are looking forward to their 100th birthdays comes as a pleasant surprise. 

It's especially poignant having been written by Jay Levin, an accomplished reporter whose local obituaries usually end up on the back pages.

Never a safe city

At the top of A-1, the first chief quoted in the story on police cutbacks is the head of the force in Englewood, where residents and pedestrians aren't safe even when the department is at full strength.

The assignment desk and staff in Woodland Park must have taken a three-day weekend, if a Star-Ledger story on school budgets was needed to plug a hole on A-1 today.

Bathroom idles

Scandale, Sykes and other editors were alarmed their smart phones stored their locations and could reveal how much time they waste in bathrooms (A-1 and A-7), instead of getting out of the office, talking to their neighbors and learning something -- anything -- about North Jersey.

Wrong again

On the Local front, Road Warrior John Cichowski is wrong when he calls the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid an "electric" car.

Readers looking for municipal news in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes's section will find not one, not two, but three stories about historic preservation (L-1 and L-3).

Leaves a bad taste

The reporter who wrote a gushing profile about the Corrado family appears to have never shopped or purchased expired food in one of its North Jersey food stores, where the quality of produce has dropped in recent years. (Business front). 

The flagship Clifton store has been known to cover the use-by date on salad mixes with a price sticker.

The Corner Table Columnist Elisa Ung appears to be tired of leaving the office. At the end of her Sunday column on the Better Living front, she asks readers for tips to help her write two future columns.

What's next? Polling customers and publishing their opinions in her restaurant reviews?
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4 comments:

  1. Agree, Corrado's is like a Koren green grocer--produce looks great, priced well, expires tomorrow. The Advertising department decides who is profiled.

    You know by now that Scandale does not decide the direction of the paper. Borg decides every movement.

    Re: the piece on the "centenarians"--remarkable people, but they couldn't find actual 100-year-olds?

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  2. I've found the big Korean stores, such as H Mart, have improved greatly and no longer can be lumped in with Corrado's.

    I never shop at the small Korean greengrocers, such as the one in Hackensack called Green Giant, I think.

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  3. You're thinking of the Jolly Green Giant, Vic ... the Hackensack market is called simply Giant.

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  4. Thanks. The last time I shopped there many years ago, the parking lot was swarming with lots of those tiny flies. How gross.

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