Friday, June 24, 2011

Democrats hit editorial road block

Downtown PatersonImage via Wikipedia
Editor Francis Scandale believes Paterson is nothing more than a drug and prostitution center that endangers the morality of North Jersey's suburbs.

Finally.


Democrats finally stepped up and rewrote Governor Christie's budget plan to boost aid to public schools and tax relief for seniors, as well as impose a tax surcharge on millionaires.


What does Editor Francis Scandale do? Of course, he leads Page 1 of The Record with it. 


But where are the supporting sidebars -- such as the Charles Stile column -- where is the A-1 package on this momentous change of heart?


Raids on a drug ring in Paterson as the A-1 off-lead? Hasn't Scandale destroyed Paterson's reputation enough with past series on drug sales and prostitution?


OK, Francis. I can see the gee-whiz, front-page photo of flash flooding in Saddle River. (Wonder if residents store their millions in the basement.)


But it's only six days before the budget deadline. Use the flood-photo caption to refer to a story in Local or anywhere else; not A-1.  


The Democrats don't even get any support from Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin, who appears to have written today's A-20 column on gay marriage from a closet.


Time for a farewell


It's time to kill the Road Warrior column.


Today, Columnist John Cichowski wastes readers time with a red-tape story nobody cares about -- a tale far removed from the commuting problems he is supposed to write about.


His next column will be about a man who sets off for Vermont to buy a classic car, gets lost, can't find a free road map, then endures long lines at the MVC office. 


A follow-up will count the number of potholes on the round trip and, despite the warm weather, will caution readers about roof ice.


Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes must be asleep at her computer. How could she not notice how irrelevant her hand-picked Road Warrior columnist has become?


Floating car


On Page L-9, the Business editors publish a photo of a floating Mercedez-Benz convertible.


Publisher Stephen A. Borg is planning to trade in both his yacht and his gas-guzzling SUV on one of these beauties.


Food fight


In the Better Living centerfold, Staff Writer Elisa Ung damns another restaurant with faint praise, Natalie's in Ridgewood, giving it only two stars out of four.


The food photos look fabulous, but $26 for four shrimp and $23 for presumably farmed tilapia of questionable quality?


Ung has so little to say about the food, she devotes the better part of the first six paragraphs to the irrelevant -- how many times the restaurant moved around the Ridgewood business distrcit.


In another six paragraphs, the review ends.
                   

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3 comments:

  1. Do the reporters for NJMG just watch CNN and the 10 O'clock news than write there stories to be submited to The Record based on that news? Because every time I read The Record there is nothing but yesterdays news. What happened to investigating reporting?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Four shrimp for twenty six bucks? That comes to six dollars a shrimp with two bucks left over. For that price you could get four one pound lobsters for $5.99 a pound at ShopRite with enough left over for a jar of fra diavolo sauce.

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  3. I don't think there is the staff or time for investigative news. The assignment desk can't keep up with local news or anything else.

    In the past, the editors squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries on ill-conceived investigations.

    ReplyDelete

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