Road Warrior can't read the calendar

Chairman Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg's boyhood home in Hackensack.

Editor's note: In his Road Warrior column on Sunday, Staff Writer John Cichowski said it has been a "full four months" since Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29. In fact, the three-month anniversary passed only five days before. Earlier, Cichowski incorrectly reported the day a train smashed into a tractor-trailer in Little Falls. Those glaring errors weren't caught by six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton or her clueless staff.

The inactivity of writing the vast majority of his Road Warrior columns from news releases, studies, reports and reader e-mails has caught up to Staff Writer John Cichowski, who rarely leaves his computer to do any legwork.

Here is part of another e-mail to management from a reader who is alarmed by all of the misinformation Cichowski passes along to readers:

"The Road Warrior continues to hand out misinformed, false, and exaggerated nonsense to commuters, who are desperate for real answers about repairs to Sandy-damaged rail stations.

"Road Warrior babbles more nonsense about how it has been four months since Sandy, when it has been a little over 3 months. This is after he babbled in his Jan. 25 column that it was 8 weeks, when it was really 12 weeks, since Sandy.

"Why doesn't The Record correct his nonsense before it is published?

"Mistaken column by mistaken column, it is becoming too much for readers to forgive.

"Instead of misinformation and false complaints, why didn't the Road Warrior notify readers about an upcoming NJ Transit commuter forum at Hoboken rail station on Feb. 12 so that they could voice their concerns directly to transit officials?"

Read the full text of the e-mail on the Facebook Bloopers page:

Time flies for the Road Warrior 



Levitating mayor

Ed Koch was such a great New York City mayor his powers apparently survived him, according to today's Page 1 photo caption.

The caption suggested the casket wasn't carried, but actually levitated out of the Fifth Avenue synagogue on Monday: 

"The casket of former Mayor Ed Koch left the funeral at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue."

On A-2, a correction tells readers a Sunday caption listed Alicia Rose, but that she wasn't actually in the photo. Oops.

After years of practicing body count journalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Associated Press actually supplied a photo of Kabul residents who weren't being blown apart by a suicide bomber (A-2).

Who knew there was any normalcy in war-torn Afghanistan? But I question the photo overline, "SHOT OF THE DAY." 

The doughnut hole

The morbidly obese Governor Christie actually pulled out a doughnut and ate it during taping of the David Letterman TV show on Monday (A-4).

In 2011, Letterman put Christie's weight at 400 pounds. 

Now, we know what Christie is going to do after he loses his bid for a second term: open a Dunkin' Donuts franchise.

The money game

The Record is already covering the campaign, and will accord space to Christie and Democrat Barbara Buono based on how much special interest money they raise (A-4), just as the Woodland Park daily did with North Jersey congressional candidates last November.

Four photos with one story threw Production Editor Liz Houlton's copy editors into a dither (A-7). The caption refers to a photo as "adjacent," a word that should never be used.

Those old coots

On the front of Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes lampoons another elderly driver who apparently mistook the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal, and backed his car out of a garage and into a stream (L-1).

After years of publishing photos of senior crashes and other mayhem, some of it fatal, you'd think Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, would realize older drivers need information on where they can go to refresh their skills. 

Five paragraphs of Hackensack news appear on L-3 today. That's all she wrote. 

Sykes and Sforza continue to mystify readers by running minor accident photos on their front, and burying the obits of fascinating North Jersey residents, such as rememberances of Guy Tozzoli and Jack Reno on L-8 today. 

Republicans set to attack obesity epidemic

With an obese Governor Christie in the ascendancy, an elephant seems to be an appropriate symbol for the Republican Party.

If Governor Christie is going to deliver the keynote address at next month's Republican National Convention, his selection might signal a major GOP offensive against the obesity epidemic.

Who better to serve as a poster official for the epidemic than New Jersey's own GOP bully, whose out-of-control eating is on display in every photo The Record publishes?

Today's lead story on Page 1 of the Woodland Park daily cites "well-placed Republican sources." I can cite only "unusually tasty sauces."

Another big error

The major element on A-1 today is a surprisingly straightforward Mike Kelly column on the scheduled deployment to Afghanistan of a National Guard unit at the Teaneck Armory.

Kelly's effort is ruined by Editor Liz Houlton -- the Queen of Errors -- whose news copy editors wrote an incorrect A-1 photo caption: "They were leave for Afghanistan today."

But in the fifth paragraph on the front page, Kelly clearly says the unit is going to an Army base in Tennessee for two months of training before leaving the country.

That Army base must be in Kabul, Tenn. Even the headline is misleading; the unit won't "deploy" until late September.

Zisaville 'news'

Some readers welcomed Kelly's account on Wednesday of how then-Police Chief Ken Zisa ordered Hackensack cops to shoot at computer hard drives at a firing range in 2009.

But the columnist, the Hackensack reporter and their editors to continue to ignore what's going on in the city now, especially the calls for City Attorney Joseph Zisa to resign.

Zisa, cousin of the disgraced and convicted former police chief, has recused himself from defending the city against numerous civil suits.

That led the city to hire another lawyer and spend tens of thousands of extra dollars on legal fees -- with no end in sight.

Staff Writer Stephanie Akin covered the Hackensack City Council meeting on Tuesday night and came away with nothing more than a short story on street paving (L-3).

Related articles

• Christie downsizes to spoon from shovel

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• Burying the lede on Hackensack

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• Hackensack is front-page news again

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• Is the Zisa family still running Hackensack?

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Inside the Sunday news meeting

Image by allaboutgeorge via Flickr

What might have been said during the Sunday afternoon news meeting of editors at The Record in Woodland Park:

"OK. What have we got for A-1 tomorrow?"

"A teacher was murdered in her Dumont home, and a soldier from Ramsey died last week in Afghanistan."

"Is Governor Christie a suspect in the murder?"

"No. But her husband is."

"What else?"

"We have a nice feature on all the unemployed professionals who got census takers jobs."

"Don't mention that Victor got one of those jobs. What about the rest of Page 1?"

"We've been getting a lot of heat for not having minority or female columnists, so why not run Tara's column
out front on the guy who won the Masters. His wife has cancer."

"Plenty of wives have cancer. Plenty of husbands lost their insurance and their wives have cancer.
Plenty of wives have probably died of cancer during the recession. What's the connection here?"

"We don't have anything else."

A good front, but not much else

Image by simminch via Flickr

Staff writers have two compelling stories about North Jersey residents to relate on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but the rest of the paper is really thin and devoid of any meaningful local news.

The two, long Page 1 pieces report the rescue of a Teaneck woman from the rubble of a hotel in Haiti on Thursday (photo), two days after the quake, and the death of a Westwood soldier Afghanistan.

There is no explanation why the Teaneck story wasn't in the paper yesterday, a day after the rescue. The Westwood story "buries" the lead paragraph: "Westwood's heart was broken ...."

There was so little municipal news available yesterday, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and the other lazy, desperate and incompetent editors had to put a story on a hospital team leaving for Haiti on the front of the Local section, instead of in the A-section, where the rest of the quake news appears.

The rest of the section has "filler," but no stories about Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck or any of the other premier towns in Bergen County.

In Better Living, Food Editor Bill Pitcher puts on his recipe-editor's hat to give us a trio of preparations for marshmallows, calling them one of  "the season's prime ingredients." It's part of the food editor's ongoing effort to aid the obesity epidemic in North Jersey. Where is his editor, Barbara Jaeger, out to lunch?