Three reporters joined at the hip

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Head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes is so proud of the reporting triplets she hatched several years ago, she showers them with preferential treatment. Today, Staff Writers Monsy Alvarado, Jean Rimbach and Shawn Boburg hit the front page of  The Record of Woodland Park with yet another story on suspended Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa -- this one about his business interests.


This might be Rimbach's first byline in 2010; in recent years, she has averaged one a year. Alvarado, who is assigned to cover Hackensack, wrote her last non-Police Department story on May 19 -- more than two months ago -- and her last Zisa story a month ago. She has been silent on the city's proposed budget and tax hike, and the new mayor, who was sworn in July 1. Boburg's byline also is rare.

Hasn't Sykes, Alvarado and the others done enough on lawsuits against Zisa, the criminal charges he faces, his conflicts of interests and his other legal problems? Don't Hackensack readers deserve basic information about who is running the city, the budget, taxes and related municipal matters?


Sykes is so gaga over her dearly beloved triplets she had them chasing former lawman Michael Mordaga for nearly three years. Then, she picked them up and comforted them after they fell on their faces with a single story so pathetically weak, Editor Frank Scandale wouldn't allow it on Page 1. And in view of all the crap Scandale does run on the front, that's saying something. 

The triplets came up with a lot more on Zisa, but got beaten to the punch by the Bergen County prosecutor.


The vast majority of Hackensack readers undoubtedly would be content with coverage of the Zisa case as it plays out in the courts, especially if they are going to be denied just about any other news about the city. Running pictures and a story about flooding in Hackensack, as the paper does today in the absence of anything else, is just an insult to readers.

Alvarado does have a second story today, on the Local front, about the suspension of three rookie Hackensack police officers. Again, she is a broken record at the broken Record.

I thought the proposal to carve up Teterboro was declared dead a few weeks ago . So why does the former Hackensack daily have a figure-filled A-1 story and an L-1 column on the plan today?

(Map: Bergen County, 1896.)

Is that all there is?

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The Record of Woodland Park produces a meaty front page today, but disappoints on so many other scores, you have to wonder if that's the best Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes can do. 


Did anyone get past the first few paragraphs of the central element on A-1, a mother's plea that her wannabe terrorist son is really a good kid and that he was forced to do wrong by the FBI? This story is a waste of staff effort and readers' time. 

On the proposed breakup of Teterboro, do we really care what political columnist Charles Stile thinks? And why is the paper so eager to give voice to defense attorneys' claims that the convictions of Joseph Ferriero, Dennis Oury and Joseph Congilio may be overturned?

Now, look at the Page 1 promotion, "Two days that captured a nation." Is sports columnist Tara Sullivan delusional? Does she actually think millions were riveted to their TVs for an 11-hour tennis match between nobodys or that most readers actually believe the U.S. team has any chance of winning the Word Cup? Her columns today and Thursday are so full of hype as to be simply unreadable.


On A-20 and A-21 today are an editorial and an opinion column condemning the proposed breakup of Teterboro that were likely edited and written by the same man, Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin. The editorial would have been enough. How does he expect to have any credibility?

There is a lot of court and crime news in Local today, but no news of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood or a lot of other towns in North Jersey.

What's the point of continuing Better Living's Eating Out on $50 restaurant review by free-lancer Jeff Page when only two can eat for that money, in contrast to the original concept, four people eating out for $50? The paper was too cheap to make it Eating Out on $60 or Eating Out on $70, because it didn't want to reimburse the reviewer more than $50, so it cheats readers.


In today's review of a dreadful kosher burger restaurant in Teaneck, Page spends only $35.71 (and likely got reimbursed for only $35.71) and complains mightily of the service or lack of it. A good paper would have shit-canned the piece and asked for another, but frugal Features Director Barbara Jaeger probably balked at spending more money on a new review. She started the $50 review as a cost-saving measure in the first place.

And why is Food Editor Bill Pitcher reviewing A Mano, a pricey, Neapolitan pizza place in Ridgewood that has gotten a lot more ink in the three years it has been open than most other North Jersey restaurants? The only reason might be that it has a great public relations firm that nagged Pitcher for even more publicity. 

He doesn't mention the pizzas are a mere 12 inches and because of the nature of the dough, they can't be baked to a crispy well-done. And his rating of two and a half stars tells readers not to bother -- being just a half-star more than the rating given to a mediocre, faux-Caribbean restaurant called Bahama Breeze last year. Maybe Pitcher felt guilty giving in to the P.R. firm. In the end, it's readers who get screwed.

More unbelievably boring Page 1 news

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The suicide of a state trooper and a $20 billion BP fund for victims earn only a few paragraphs each on Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park today, but most of the page is devoted to maybe, could-be, wannabe stories the desperate editors are trying to pass off as local news.


Do North Jersey residents really care if the borough of Teterboro is carved up? All this coverage for a trial balloon? What residents are really dying to know is why the newspaper hasn't written anything about the tremendous quality-of-life impact the small airport has on them every day?

Are the Borgs among the fat cats whose behinds are pampered in noisy business jets, as an anonymous commentator has reported? Those planes seem to scrape rooftops in Hackensack, Teaneck, Maywood and other towns, depriving residents of the enjoyment of their back yards and high-rise balconies.

If so, that might explain why editors such as Frank Scandale, Deirdre Sykes and others have avoided the noise story for so many years. Or is former Publisher Malcolm A. Borg's long-time support for an aviation museum at the airport the reason the charter jet companies get so much promotional coverage in Business?


Of course, when you have lazy transportation reporters like Tom Davis and Assignment Editor Dan Sforza, who as a transportation reporter wrote about "highways of the future," you'll never get hard-hitting reporting about the airport or anything else. What you do get is Davis' speculative, A-1 story today on the possible construction of a Hudson River rail tunnel for Amtrak "within 20 years." Twenty years!


Davis, Sforza, Road Warrior John Cichowski and other lazy staffers refuse to look at the quality of the mass transit commuters have to contend with now, such as the creaking, decades-old local buses NJ Transit still uses in Bergen and Passaic counties. It might be that the riders, largely working class blacks and Hispanics who can't afford cars, are easy to ignore for the newspaper's overwhelmingly white newsroom staff.

Eager to deny President Obama a victory, an editorial on A-22 minimizes his Oval Office address, and blames him for not stopping the BP oil leak. As bad as the gushing oil is, it's ridiculous to compare the disaster to World War II, but Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin desperately needs exaggeration to make his point.


With no substantial Hackensack or Teaneck news to work with -- and the speculative Teterboro story all over A-1 --  all the editors have for the Local front today is police and court news. There's not even a word from Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, on the proposed city budget and tax hike.


Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano turns out a short piece on the Mackay Park ice rink -- the first story about the city since the end of May. We welcome back this bull dog of news.

In Better Living, it is no-food-news Thursday.

(Photo: President Obama in the White House Oval Office)