Editors at The Record are barking up the wrong tree

On Monday, when City Hall was closed for Presidents Day, Hackensack sent a private contractor to cut down city owned trees on Euclid Avenue without notice to residents. No one answered the phones at the Department of Public Works or other offices.

The top half of the tree was fed directly into a chipping machine called the "Beever," which helps explain why so many reporters at The Record never learned how to spell.

This tree and two others on the block were damaged by Superstorm Sandy. The trees could have been more than 160 years old, dating to the development of Fairmount in the 1850s.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR


The only bright spot on Page 1 today is the upbeat story about how the Ridgewood and Fair Lawn libraries are helping impoverished Paterson give every child a book to take home and keep.

But readers soon learn North Jersey Media Group, The Record and the Herald News are involved -- so this is just another public-relations ploy to cover up the irresponsible decline in coverage of Hackensack and so many other towns.

Afternoon naps have become a fixture on the local-news assignment desk of head Editor Deirdre Sykes and her snoring deputy, Dan Sforza.

More Paterson crime

Typical of The Record's coverage of Silk City is the story below the fold on a black pastor who is on trial in the apparently premeditated attempted murder of his "longtime mistress" (A-1).

Meanwhile, Editor Marty Gottlieb keeps hitting readers over the head with yet another story about the investigation of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. (A-1).

Is there an explanation in the lead A-1 story -- on the $3.9 billion PSE&G is spending to get systems ready for the next superstorm -- why this wasn't launched after the devastating pre-Halloween storm in 2011?
 
Sykes' and Sforza's Local news section is silent again on Hackesack municipal affairs.

Selling out readers

In Better Living, the Starters piece on Ridgewood Fare is so promotional readers wonder whether the pricey restaurant had to agree to a display advertising contract in return (BL-1).

Joyce Venezia Suss, the writer, quotes Ridgewood Fare's general manager praising the place to the sky, but she is getting paid to say all of that, so what are readers to think.

Why is this so long? Is Suss getting paid by the inch?

The clueless Suss even quotes the restaurant's flunky as saying "all proteins" are "slow-growth and hormone-free," but that could mean they are filled with harmful animal antibiotics.

What a disgrace.