Editors urge us to hunt for Bergen County's 'most wanted'

Bergen County's new Justice Center is going up in Hackensack. A new garage is shown nearing completion, above and below. The garage and building, expected to be the latest piece of tax-exempt property in a city with too many non-profits, is certain to elicit a resounding chorus of boos from residents when it is completed.

Construction on a parking lot has displaced the cars of attorneys, visitors and jurors to the old headquarters of The Record on River Street, where the county is paying North Jersey Media Group a king's ransom to lease hundreds of spaces.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

It's right there on The Record's tabloid front page today -- a rogues gallery of suspected rapists, murderers and robbers who are called Bergen County's "most wanted."

"If you want to keep an eye out for such fugitives, you'll have to dig up a lot of extra details on your own," Staff Writer John Seasly says in the third paragraph on A-1 today.

Is Seasly and Editor Martin Gottlieb kidding? 

Why would any reader want to hunt for a fugitive? Don't we already pay law enforcement agencies tons of tax money to do just that?

What a silly way for Gottlieb to attempt to make this ridiculous excuse for front-page news approachable.

Not much else

But North Jersey readers are screwed twice, because there isn't much else of interest in today's thin Sunday paper, certainly not from three lazy reporters who fancy themselves columnists.

Charles Stile seems incapable of writing anything else but another boring analysis of Governor Christie's politics (A-1).

You'd expect Columnist John Cichowski or Mike Kelly to look into why a Bergen County prosecutor's detective escaped being charged in the March 9 death of a pedestrian in Hackensack.

But Cichowski devotes his entire Road Warrior piece to advice for new-car buyers, a real perversion of what began as column for commuters (L-1).

And Kelly gives us a second boring column on the history of the shuttered Izod Center, going all the way back to a 1981 concert (O-1). 

The editors also are sticking with the dated thumbnail photo of Kelly's shit-eating grin.

Local news?

Readers know Stile, Cichowski and Kelly as supremely professional space fillers, but some of the editors do just as well.

If you're looking for local news, the inclusion of a long, wire-service obit for an obscure Swedish poet on L-6 today tells you Assignment Editors Deirdre Sykes and Dan Sforza weren't.