Speeders get a pass from the Road Warrior

Cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park in Newark on Saturday, when hundreds of families, including many Asian-Americans, enjoyed a chilly spring day amid the annual natural splendor.

Branch Brook Lake is stocked with trout.

Driving to Newark on the Garden State Parkway on Saturday, I set my cruise control to 60 mph, and as usual, nearly every other car passed me, exceeding the 55 mph speed limit by 10, 20, even 30 mph.

Drivers raced one another, tailgating the car in front, or weaved in and out of slower traffic. 
 
But the scariest moments came when I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a speeding car racing  toward my rear bumper, only to swerve into the next lane at the last moment.

On Friday evening, I saw two near collisions on both the turnpike and parkway as speeding drivers dove for the center lane at the same time. 

These experiences reminded me of a message I saw one day on an overhead sign near Exit 129 of the parkway: "66% of all accidents involve speeding."

Slow journalism

Speeding also is the cause of most red-light violations, but why do readers of The Record read so little about the problem or the apparent lack of enforcement that emboldens these violators?

The reason is clear: Since late 2003, Road Warrior John Cichowski has been stuck in the slow journalism lane: on lines at the MVC or measuring potholes or fielding complaints about E-ZPass.

Today's column is about one man's experience with getting his 2005 minivan inspected (L-1). How irrelevant can you get?

Out of steam

Cichowski long ago ran out of ideas for his column, which is supposed to appear three times a week, and he refuses to cover mass transit, though his mission is to report about commuting problems.

He now relies almost exclusively on e-mails from complaining drivers who get high from seeing their names in print, as well as studies, reports and other boring statistics that he often can't report accurately. 

The only way he can produce so much copy, it seems, is to devote as many columns as possible to odd circumstances that have no meaning to the vast majority of readers.

Burned-out staffers

Today's front page is dominated by news of the Boston marathon bombing suspect and victims, including a column by another burned-out Record columnist, Mike Kelly, that no one will read.

In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, the only Hackensack news today is a reprint from Friday's edition of the weekly Hackensack Chronicle.

Police Director Mike Mordaga is proposing to hire Class II Special Law Enforcement Officers to supplement regular police officers, who are represented by a union (L-3).

City property tax payers would welcome those officers, who will be paid $15 to $20 an hour and receive no benefits, but who will carry guns and get the same training as regular cops.

Injuries have knocked out some of the 114 officers in the department, Mordaga said last week.

Another thin paper

Today's thin Sunday edition includes a Better Living section with no meaningful food coverage, and a Business section with a cover story on a small business in Bellevue, Wash.

Now, that's "local news." 

Official incompetence gets a pass

Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, a city of haves and have-nots. When did The Record last publish a story on the high school's desegregation effort?

 
The Record today winks at official incompetence -- just as Editor Marty Gottlieb ignores the stubborn incompetence of all of the sub-editors he inherited at the end of January.

The front of the Business section is filled with a glowing profile of Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and her supposedly key role in Governor Christie's "business-friendly" push (A-1 and B-1).

What a joke. The state's unemployment rate is above 9% -- the highest in decades and higher than the nation's.

Maybe Guadagno should start sleeping with wealthy CEOs and small-business owners to get them to hire more workers.

Business Editor Bill Donnellon and Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher have already prostituted themselves with this ridiculous Guadagno story.

Christie's bribes -- in the form of hundreds of millions in business tax breaks and freedom from an income-tax surcharge -- have been miserable failures.

Crime on A-1

Gottlieb leads Page 1 of today's Sunday edition with a crime story, and another follow-up on a plan to "radically alter the landscape of Garret Mountain" -- The Record's home since 2009.

The third, major front-page story today only serves to remind readers of the paper's largely negative coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement a year ago (A-1).

Little local news

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, do their usual poor job with the Local news section.

The big news from Englewood is "fancy" Belgian block curbs replacing concrete -- not further strides in desegregating Dwight Morrow High School (L-3).

Sykes and Sforza couldn't find any Hackensack or Teaneck news today.

Road Warrior John Cichowski again ignores the needs of commuters with his flattering portrait of the Fort Lee Municipal Court judge (L-1).

The only mass transit news in the paper is on L-3 -- a photo and story relating how a train destroyed a gas-guzzling, polluting SUV.

The driver should get a public service award.

Back to Business

A consumer column on the Business front today quotes a trade association executive explaining the downsizing of food products as giving it to "demand ... for smaller packages."

Then, how does Food Institute President Brian Todd and Columnist Kevin DeMarrais explain the wild popularity of big sizes at Costco Wholesale, where you can still buy a 64-ounce half-gallon of Tropicana orange juice?

Despite a monthly trip "to check out prices and trends in North Jersey supermarkets," DeMarrais also continues to ignore organic food and naturally raised meat and poultry.

On a sugar high

On the Better Living front today, you'll find a rambling column from Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung, who refers to Utah and California in describing the experience of dining out in North Jersey (BL-1).

After at least three long front-page stories last week on the identification of Patricia Viola, who disappeared in 2001, couldn't Columnist Mike Kelly find anything else to write about (O-1)? 

He should disappear.

Mile High journalism

Did anybody read the cover story on Denver by klutzy Travel Editor Jill Schensul (T-1)?

Former newsroom staffers took one look and put the section in the recycling bin -- to avoid painful reminders of how Denver newspaper veteran Francis "Frank" Scandale screwed up The Record in his 11-plus years as editor.

Readers' eyelids are getting heavier

Image by Amanda Mines via Flickr

Sleeping-pill use among readers of The Record has plummeted, along with readership.

Commentary on The Record of Woodland Park will resume on Monday.

I can't imagine a more sleep-inducing paper than Sunday's edition -- from the lackluster front page to the Local, Business, Better Living, Opinion and Real Estate sections. Quick. What's in Travel today?

Columns by Mike Kelly, Road Warrior John Cichowski, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung and Bill Ervolino are so boring, you can hear the copy editors snoring.

Is Margulies a journalist?

Image by Gianfranco Goria via Flickr

Where does Margulies get off confusing readers about the impact of Governor Christie's austere state budget? His cartoon today, in Opinion, seems to suggest the wealthy are being "screwed" by the governor? Or does he mean they will be running for their corkscrews and drink to their good fortune?

If he is saying the rich will be screwed, it's just plain inaccurate. In fact, the Borgs and other wealthy families no longer have to pay the so-called millionaire's tax, and owners of small businesses get a 4% tax cut on corporate income. If he's saying they'll be celebrating, it's an especially poor choice of image, given Stephen and Jennifer Borg's investment in an Englewood wine bar, not to mention their father's past problems with alcohol.

This cartoon doesn't say much for Margulies' journalism credentials.  

Most of the front page in The Record of Woodland Park today is devoted to the state's financial crisis: 

"Plenty of pain

to go around"

This is a reader-friendly summary of Christie's proposed cuts, but much of the rest of the Sunday paper is disappointing.

The L-1 piece on recycling electronics omits any mention of Hackensack's program to accept TVs, computers and batteries year-round, one of the few municipal efforts in North Jersey.

Where does Road Warrior John Cichowski have his head buried, so he doesn't have to write about lousy local bus service? Potholes (L-1). Inside Local, possible school cuts in Passaic city and Wayne are explored in great detail, but Hackensack schools are ignored.


In Business, what is the point of the article on luxury-car importers? The B-2 graphic also appears to be inaccurate on Ferrari sales: They went up, not down.


One of the best pieces in today's paper didn't come from a staffer. It's Jeff Tittel's O-1 piece on restoring the flood plain (he's director of the Sierra Club in New Jersey).

Wait until next year

Image via Wikipedia

Continuing its apparent boycott on news of Hackensack and many other important Bergen County towns, The Record of Woodland Park may be telling us to wait until next year. I guess the lazy, incompetent editors didn't make a New Year's resolution to do a better job of covering local news.

For the third day in a row, most of the front page today is devoted to the Jets football team and airhead reporter John Brennan, who squanders his trip to Indianapolis by turning in some of the most lackluster copy I've ever seen. The bottom of the front page goes to the poor schmucks who live in polluted Pompton Lakes (map), where DuPont, and town and state officials have been screwing around for more than 20 years on cleaning up groundwater contamination. Isn't home rule a great system?

You'll find lots of "filler" stories today, the kind the desperate editors have to run in the absence of real news, like the story on A-4 about three-wheel motorcycles in Los Angeles. The crisis in Haiti stays inside today, but do readers really need three stories on North Jersey doctors, a pastor and a nurse who went there?

There is good news for consumers in the Business pages, for a change, word that Governor Corzine signed a law before he left office allowing sellers' real estate agents to give rebates to buyers. I'm still waiting for a story on real estate agents who represent buyers and get paid by sellers.

Have you ever heard of anyone being jailed for not going to a deposition -- confidential testimony given under oath in a civil lawsuit before a trial? Of course not, but in a Page 1 promo and in the Local section, reporter Ashley Kindergan quotes a plaintiff saying he wants the Bergenfield mayor jailed. This is a non-story.

You have to wonder why head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and the editor who supervise Kindergan, one of the best reporters on the local news staff, pushed this turkey for the front of the section. And what do you make of Columnist Jersey Mike Kelly's latest, pathetic effort?

Image via Wikipedia

 Yes. Hackensack residents feel good about next year.

Anti-mass transit tirade

Especially in this economy, newspapers like The Record of Woodland Park love the revenue they get from automobile advertising. But The Record goes further, employing reporters who write endlessly about the woes drivers face on the road and at the motor vehicle agency, but ignore the low quality of most bus and rail service.

In congested North Jersey, the former Hackensack daily stubbornly refuses to recognize that mass transit -- not the automobile -- holds the key to residents' future mobility. So here comes so-called transportation reporter Tom Davis today with a Page 1 tirade against the proposed light-rail line that will connect Tenafly, Englewood and other communities to Hudson River ferries and PATH trains. They haven't had passenger rail service since the 1960s.

If you read this lavishly illustrated story carefully, you'll notice how much positive information is missing and how the reporter quotes  only a few people's fears about noise, pollution and traffic jams -- conditions that have existed for decades from busy freight-railroad traffic along the very same Northern Branch. This reporter is not much of a journalist.

One crucial detail Davis is careful to omit to make his anti-mass transit case is that trolley-like, electric-driven light rail will be far quieter than the polluting diesel locomotives originally proposed, as well as more efficient and user-friendly. Plus, systems like it will help cut our dependence on foreign oil. Have you ever heard about how General Motors bought up trolley lines in major cities and closed them down to juice the sales of automobiles?

The first critic the reporter quotes is a man who only occasionally commutes into the city. The second critic is a bus patron. The third is Englewood Mayor Michael Wildes, a relentless self-promoter and immigration lawyer, who says people are concerned about runoff from cars left in parking lots all day. What about runoff from all the cars in the huge parking lot between Palisade Avenue and the old Englewood railroad station?  Why hasn't he ever expressed concern about runoff before?

Davis has been a transportation reporter for many years, but he has refused to expose the incredible noise, pollution and waste of fuel  from all the moguls, fat cats and hip-hop stars flying their multimillion-dollar private jets into and out of Teterboro Airport.

You won't find any education, development, municipal or quality of life news about Hackensack or Teaneck in the paper today -- none was reported -- but you'll find about 10 court, crime and traffic mishap stories, plus two more about cops. Giovanna Fabiano, the Englewood reporter, comes up with a story about security alarm fines upsetting residents and business owners. She continues to ignore downtown traffic jams, an open-air police firing range and the segregated elementary and middle schools, though.

Northern Branch light-rail Web site