Travel editor betrays her readers with another free trip

When an employee of Babe's Taxi in Fort Lee complained about the huge traffic jam caused by closure of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge last September, a Port Authority police officer told him to write a letter to Governor Christie. The exit to the company's garage, above, is on Hudson Street, which normally provides three lanes leading to upper-level tollbooths, below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Jill Schensul, the perpetually jet-lagged editor of The Record's Travel section, went on another free press junket in search of what might seem like a local story.

Her gushing Sunday cover piece -- delivered with today's paper -- describes an all-expenses-paid trip to a shipyard that is building Royal Caribbean's Quantum of the Sea, "which will sail to its home port of Cape Liberty in Bayonne in November" (T-1).

Traffic jams

Schensul should have stayed home and done some reporting on Cape Liberty, which was a traffic and logistical nightmare when I dropped off and picked up cruise-ship passengers this past summer.

In Bayonne, vacationers don't have direct access to the ship.

Instead, they are processed in a shed and then taken to the ship on shuttle buses.  

To drop off or pick up passengers, a long, double line of buses, cars, vans and taxis enter the port and must take a slow, circuitous route to the shed that can consume close to an hour.

What a great start to a vacation: Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Schensul's free trip was to a shipyard in a small German town, raising questions about whether this same yard built warships during World War II.

Why this tremendous amount of publicity for Royal Caribbean? 

With 2,090 staterooms, the new ship will surely be a zoo at sea, complete with hundreds of bratty children. What is the appeal of that?

Correction

The Travel section also publishes an embarrassing correction -- to fix captions on two selfies from Venice that were "inadvertently" switched last week (T-1 and A-2 of today's paper).

Apparently, an Arabic family -- the Sayeghs of Paterson -- were given a Jewish couple's names -- the Kapplemans of Saddle Brook, and vice versa. Sweet.

Production Editor Liz Houlton, who is paid six figures to prevent such mistakes, must have been on vacation.

Last week, no one seemed to notice or care three names were under the couple's photo and two names were under the photo of a family of three.

Today's paper

Editor Marty Gottlieb leads today's paper with another report on Port Authority police officers at the George Washington Bridge "scrambling to deal with a traffic nightmare caused by ... lane closures that clogged Fort Lee's streets last September" (A-1).

Governor Christie is mentioned in passing:

"Christie has denied any involvement [in] or prior knowledge [of] the lane closures," reports Staff Writer Shawn Boburg, swallowing whole the legal whitewash that will cost taxpayers $7 million-plus.

Dumb and dumber

On the Local front, Staff Writer John Brennan reports what the headline calls "signs of activity" on the American Dream retail-entertainment complex, including painters covering the ugly checkerboard exterior (L-1).

Now, readers are waiting for test results showing signs of brain activity in the former sports reporter's head.

Dumber still was Road Warrior John Cichowski's Tuesday column on the anniversary of the lane closures in Fort Lee, according to the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

"In his Tuesday column, the Road Warrior returns to the scene of the crime and continues to compound so many of his grossly mistaken columns about the closures of tollbooths and access lanes for a local Fort Lee entrance to the George Washington Bridge during the week of Sept. 9, 2013.

"The Road Warrior reported that a Fort Lee resident was 'prescient' when he warned the Road Warrior during that week about impending tragedies that would be caused by the associated traffic jams.

"Yet, The Record and every other credible news source over the past year has reported that there were absolutely no tragedies that were directly caused by these closures."

Also, Cichowski and The Record have repeatedly exaggerated the impact of closing two of three access lanes to the bridge's upper level a year ago.

There are other Fort Lee access lanes to both the upper and lower levels, and the latter, dubbed Martha Washington, was largely unaffected during the week of Sept. 9, 2013. 

See:

More irresponsible reporting by the Road Warrior