At least readers have the recycling bin

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The Record goofed big time on the "expected" site of Whitney Houston's funeral in Newark.

Returning from a week in California, I climbed into a limo at John F. Kennedy International Airport at close to midnight on Monday and stared at the headline and big color photo on the front page of The Record, which the driver had placed on the back seat.


I was exhausted from the long flight, and it was enough to put me instantly to sleep.


A near-empty Bergen County 911 dispatching center made a terrible photo for the paper's premier page, and the story about the slow process of centralizing emergency response wasn't much better.


Loose change


I guess not much has changed at the Woodland Park daily, despite the arrival of a veteran New York Times editor to run the newsroom last month. 


As I separated the advertising and Sports sections from news and features, I consoled myself that at least I could recycle all this wasted newsprint.


The only real news on the front page today is rising gasoline prices, but that story is just catching up to the hikes North Jersey drivers have seen in the past couple of weeks.


In San Francisco, a station on Ocean Avenue in the Ingleside neighborhood raised a gallon of regular by 9 cents overnight, followed by a 6-cent increase the next day, bringing the price to $4.05. 


Today, at my Shell station on Cedar Lane in Teaneck, $3.59 a gallon for regular seems like a bargain. 


What will Editor Marty Gottlieb do when gasoline sails over $4 a gallon in North Jersey -- devote the entire front page to the news?


Christie apologist


Also on Page 1 today is another limp-weiner political column from Staff Writer Charles Stiles, who waits until the continuation page to explain that Governor Christie's bullshit plan to cut income taxes will mean jack to the middle class.


Stiles also seems to conveniently forget that Christie was elected on a platform that promised to cut property -- not income -- taxes.


In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, I see more Northvale, Fort Lee and Bogota news.


On L-3, the Hackensack reporter, Stephanie Akin, writes about a film festival sponsored by an African-American civics club. 


In Better Living, a story on the beginning of Lent was assigned to a reporter who apparently knows nothing about the wonders of wild-caught seafood, judging from how hard she pushes McDonald's crappy Filet-O-Fish (F-1). 

Monday's paper


I don't see any Hackensack news in Monday's newspaper. I haven't looked over all of the papers delivered since Feb. 13, so don't know whether other Hackensack stories have run recently.


Columnist Mike Kelly must have run out of ideas, devoting an entire column to a Haworth teen who collected nearly $1,000 for cancer research (L-1).


Sunday's paper


Most of Sunday's front page was devoted to the funeral service for Whitney Houston at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark under the headline:

Houston comes home

Unfortunately, that headline duplicated a Page 1 headline that ran only five days before over what turned out to be an embarrassing error -- a story that reported the Prudential Center was expected to be the site of the funeral.

Whitney

comes home

for funeral

That headline last Tuesday from Editor Liz Houlton's dysfunctional news copy desk doesn't even tell the story, which apparently was pulled out of thin air by Staff Writer John Brennan, who beats the sports-business beat to death. 


Brennan cited "sources familiar with the arrangements" in reporting the Prudential Center had been chosen for the funeral. I guess he has unreliable sources.


The big question is why Gottlieb or any other editor takes Brennan seriously and continues to put his stories on Page 1.