Searching in vain for local news that matters to me

In Hackensack, a former bank building at 210 Main St. is slated to be converted into apartments, one of the projects city officials are counting on to revive the faded downtown. I recall the original United Jersey Bank as having a majestic interior, including a high ceiling that was ornately decorated.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

On Page 1 of The Record today, Editor Marty Gottlieb is keeping his eye on legalization of gay marriage nationwide, school news and sports.

The front page carries a follow-up to Monday's report on how wealthy, one-school districts want to lift the salary cap on superintendents imposed by Governor Christie in 2011.

Of course, The Record has always ignored why Christie didn't impose a similar cap on police chiefs, some of whom are paid more than $200,000 a year.

And on the superintendents' pay, the editors never explain why small towns need a superintendent or what that educator actually does (A-1).

Raising superintendents pay would adversely affect Gottlieb's biggest audience, baby boomers and seniors, who pay extremely high school taxes, but that issue is never raised.  

On top of that, the home-rule system of government has proven a huge financial burden to property tax payers with its mindless duplication of services in the 86 towns in Bergen and Passaic counties. 

But Gottlieb, who lives in Manhattan, hasn't a clue, and his local assignment editors have been defending  the system for decades.

An editorial on A-10 bemoans the "brain drain" that inhibits more affluent districts from pursuing the "best and the brightest" to lead their schools.

Why isn't Edtorial Page Editor Alfred Doblin upset about another school issue, Englewood's segregated elementary and middle schools, more than 60 years after the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education?

Local news?

A photo on the Local front today shows a man with a cane who got off an NJ Transit bus on Anderson Street in Hackensack (L-1).

The caption notes the man "negotiates the slush and ice," but fails to report a snowbank created by city plows has blocked the bus stop itself for more than two weeks.

The weather story with that photo doesn't list Hackensack High School as one of the school that closed on Monday.

News handouts

Why did the lazy local assignment editors and the reporters working under them blow their cover in the first paragraph of today's lead story on L-1?

Staff Writers Stefanie Dazio and Abbott Koloff note the arrest of a suspect in the strangling death of Jordan Johnson of Fort Lee was announced in "a news release." 

On Monday, The Record reported on Page 1 details of who killed whom in Friday's murder-suicide in Closter were revealed by Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli on Twitter.

Excessive background

Every story needs background for readers who may not have been keeping up with crime developments.

But today's account of the arrest in the Fort Lee man's death seems excessively long -- perhaps because the editors, no matter how hard they try, can't generate more local Bergen news.

And Sunday's and Monday's stories on the Closter couple, Michael A. Tabacchi and Iran Pars Tabacchi, contain the same exact sentence when discussing the 15-month-old boy who was orphaned, but who isn't named:

The toddler is "by all accounts the centerpiece of a marriage that was taking root in a quiet, suburban neighborhood" (Monday's A-7 and Sunday's A-1).

But nothing is made of the age difference: The husband was 27 and the wife was 41.

The story on Monday also repeated interviews with their High Street neighbors that were published on Sunday.