Editors distort positive change in Hackensack

The Record continues to use "chaos" to describe positive change in Hackensack, and ignores city news by printing endless reports on the saga of ex-Police Chief Ken Zisa.

Hackensack readers hit a rare daily double today -- a Page 1 story plus a column on the latest developments in the legal saga of former Police Chief Ken Zisa.

The headline on the news story is straightforward, but Columnist Mike Kelly claims the developments turn the city into "Chaosville" from "Zisaville" -- echoing his earlier columns on "chaos" in Hackensack.

Now, according to the headline over Kelly's column, there is a "double dose of chaos" for city police.

Kelly the hack

Kelly's second paragraph on the front page contains another poorly written sentence from the veteran columnist, who appears to get no editing help from his assignment editor or anyone else:

"That he [Judge Joseph S. Conte] signaled in various rulings over the course of the trial, which ended nearly four months ago, that he had no problems with the evidence did not seem to matter."

High school-level writing on the front page of the Woodland Park daily. What's next?

So, what does Kelly the hack mean by a "double dose of chaos"?

Zisa stands convicted of official misconduct and insurance fraud, meaning he faces five or more years in prison without parole and loss of his pension, even though Judge Conte threw out guilty verdicts on three other counts.

Positive development

And interim Police Chief Tomas Padilla -- whom Kelly labels "a controversial Zisa pal and political force in his own right" -- announced he is retiring at the end of the year (L-1).

Hackensack residents find those developments to be positive overall. 

There is no "chaos" in Hackensack or its Police Department, where rank-and-file police officers get high marks from the vast majority of residents. 

Where were the editors?

And readers have to wonder what Kelly and the paper's editors and reporters were doing to remain clueless during all of the years the Zisa brothers were a corrosive influence in the Police Department.

Since the end of the Ken Zisa trial in May, Kelly and Hackensack reporter Stephanie Akin have carefully avoided drawing attention to the huge conflict of Zisa's cousin, Joseph Zisa, serving as city attorney and recusing himself from all of the lawsuits against the former chief.

Indeed, coverage of Hackensack in Local has declined drastically under head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, and only got worse when The Record abandoned the city for Rockaway, Woodland Park and other towns.

Unearthing altered lives

The cover story in the new Signature section discusses an historic cemetery and three of the dead whose lives were "cut short" -- as pieced together by Staff Writer Jay Levin, the master of local obituaries (SIG-1). 

As good as this story is, I was disappointed Levin didn't use the Sept. 3 death of actor Michael Clarke Duncan at 54 as a launching pad for a discussion on the apparently higher health risks faced by African-American men.

Discovering soft tacos

On SIG-4, a story by Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill carries a clunky headline, likely a special effort from Editor Liz Houlton's copy desk: 

"Plate and soul of Mexico."

And the report on a downtown Paterson taqueria is missing a couple of elements: 

Does Antojitos Poblano serve any tacos for people who don't eat meat or want to avoid its mystery poultry and pork, and is the sanitation there any better than at other taco joints in Paterson and Passaic city? 

The photo package on SIG-6 demonstrates the talent of another staff photographer -- something readers have forgotten under the onslaught of minor accident and fire photos used as filler in Local (L-1).

Sykes and Sforza are really scraping the bottom of the local news barrel today.