Campania, Governor Christie, female athletes

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A chef's suicide made his restaurant "famous," the food editor says.

In The Record of Woodland Park on Wednesday, a short L-2 story reported the closing of Campania -- the Italian restaurant in Fair Lawn that was remade on Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" TV reality show -- under the headline, "Campania to reopen under a new name."

Headlines that predict the future are among the worst, especially when they aren't attributed. This one is based on a statement by Philip Neuman, managing director of a company that bought the restaurant from Chef Joseph Cerniglia eight days before the chef's Sept. 24 suicide leap from the George Washington Bridge.

On the Second Helpings blog (northjersey.com), an item on the closing of Campania by Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill says the restaurant was "made famous" by the suicide. 

Polishing Christie's  image

On Tuesday, Page 1 had an upbeat story about a new, reform-minded education commissioner appointed by Governor Christie, but Editor Francis Scandale buried the real news about the Republican bully on A-6.

A two-paragraph story reported findings of a Rutgers-Eagleton poll: Christie is the most polarizing New Jersey governor in at least 36 years. Twenty-nine percent of the state's voters say his performance in his first 11 months in office has been "poor," while only 21 percent rate it as "excellent."

If such a poll was conducted on Scandale's performance in his nearly 10 years at The Record, a majority of employees and readers would rate it as "terrible."

Athletes on Page 1

Scandale loves to order layout editors to use sports photos of male athletes on A-1, but for some reason, a photo of the jubilant University of Connecticut women's basketball team that won 89 straight games and broke a college record held by a men's team was nowhere to be seen on A-1 on Wednesday.

Instead, the male chauvinist ran a photo of flooding in far-off California. 

Scandale likes to slap male editors' asses in a locker-room-like bonding ritual in the afternoon news meeting when sports gets played on Page 1, but I guess he was repelled by the prospect of whacking the flabby rumps of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Production Editor Liz Houlton.

Shootings, suicides and slapstick

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They're mowing them down on the streets of Paterson, and The Record of Woodland Park is there with its body-count journalism. A distraught teen and an equally distraught chef apparently jump to their deaths from the George Washington Bridge two days apart. A man falls off a roof on top of another man.


The Record's crack assignment desk, under the leadership of Deirdre "Loafs A Lot" Sykes, covers it all, with stories as detailed as today's front-page takeout on the Ridgewood teen suicide to others with so little detail they are merely filler. No names, no comment. 

Desperate Editor Francis Scandale probably wakes up every day in his Glen Rock home, shaking from a nightmare of having no real news to run on the front page. So he has made sports, police, fire and court news the new local news, especially when Sykes has sacrificed local coverage to embark on endless investigative voyages that get lost in the doldrums.

The stories lack detail, because a lot of reporters are encouraged by their lazy editors to do them by phone; who has time to do legwork? We don't pay overtime. People are charged with crimes, then hide behind their high-priced lawyers' "no comment."

I'm waiting for a Record reporter to confront a lawyer who has pocketed a big retainer, but who suddenly loses his tongue, and say "no comment" isn't good enough.

You certainly don't see that in today's "Ridgewood teen takes life" on A-1, paired with a story about that wasteful high school sports organization and another shamelessly hyped piece on horse racing.  Could the headline be any duller? Was Vinny Byrne supervising the copy desk Wednesday night? Did he allow this clunker to get past him?

The New York Times and The Star-Ledger did far better:

Private moment made public,

then a fatal jump

That was the Times headline on Page 1 today. The Star-Ledger took the Ridgewood teen's Facebook message for an effective main headline:

"jumping off the gw bridge sorry"

That's weird, because The Record quoted the Facebook message in its lead paragraph this way: "Going to jump off the gw bridge sorry."

Then, four of the paper's best reporters tell us way too much about this troubled Rutgers student, and way too little about the dorm mates who exposed him in an Internet video showing his intimate encounter with another male student.


Why run thumbnail photos of the two 18-year-old perpetrators with big smiles on their faces? Where are their mug shots? What was their relationship? Were they doing it? Is there video of that, too? Is this a case of two know-it-all Asian kids ganging up on the white guy? 


An A-5 story about the arrest of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei appeared in The Record on Wednesday, but there was no mention of the suicide seven days before by Ravi's roommate,  Tyler Clementi, who left his wallet behind. His leap from the GWB on Sept. 22 was followed two days later by the suicide of Chef Joseph Cerniglia of Campania restaurant in Fair Lawn.


The chef's death led the paper on Monday -- three days after it happened -- but the staff was never able to pin down whether financial problems were the cause. Apparently, no reporter spoke with family members or the restaurant's staff. 


Will these two bridge suicides prompt editors to assign a story on what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is doing to prevent people from jumping? If it can be done by phone, maybe. But the suicides, like the deaths of pedestrians killed by NJ Transit trains along unfenced stretches of track, make far better copy.

When is the last time you saw an expanded obituary about a suicide? Yet, don't these front-page stories about the Ridgewood teen and the Fair Lawn chef amount to long, elaborate re-tellings of their lives -- just to sell newspapers?

The editors just don't care

Do you think Francis Scandale, Deirdre Sykes and other editors at The Record of Woodland Park lose sleep over the trash they produce day after day? Forgetabout it. If their jobs depended on circulation figures, they would have been out the door long ago.


The only incentive editors were given when I worked there was to stay within their newsroom budgets. That produced a bunch of stingy managers, including  Features Director Barbara Jaeger, who used to berate staffers over their spending habits. She even barred restaurant reviewers from purchasing alcoholic beverages.


The two New Jersey stories on Page 1 are classic crap -- instant turn-offs to readers who are largely left in the dark about what is going on in their towns.

What justifies leading the paper with the EnCap indictment of a former senator, who is in prison, and a lawyer? It's justified by all the ink EnCap got -- first the gee-whiz promotional stories about golf courses and housing built atop garbage, then the paper's tedious investigation to uncover wrongdoing long after it occurred.

And the vast majority of readers already know New Jersey is a corrupt state; just run it inside with a refer, and be done with it. As for the major element on A-1, who outside of horse-racing fans in the newsroom really care if the industry goes the way of the horse and carriage? 

                                     
The death of a well-know North Jersey chef gets bumped back to L-1 today, but the staff still struggles with documenting whether financial problems were behind his suicide. And yet, for a second day, no reporter apparently attempts to talk to Chef Joseph Cerniglia's family or the staff at his Fair Lawn restaurant, Campania. This is Reporting 101.


You can read comments about Cerniglia from readers of Jason Perlow's food blog. Just click on the following link:  Off The Broiler

There is no Englewood or Hackensack news today.


Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado worked her fingers to the bone, filing five stories in a seven-day period ending Sept. 17, but I haven't seen anything about the city since then. The last two Englewood stories I saw were written by Staff Writer Ashley Kindergan, not Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano.


Maybe head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes has Fabiano working on some endless project, imparting the "Loafs A Lot" philosophy to yet another member of the local staff.

Newsroom nightmares

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Four reporters worked on today's front-page lead on the possible suicide of a well-known North Jersey chef, but it seems that none of them went inside his Fair Lawn restaurant on Sunday to interview the manager or staff. 

So readers are left in the dark. Is Joseph Cerniglia's death linked to his Campania restaurant again falling on hard times, as it did before it was turned around by Chef Gordon Ramsay on TV's "Kitchen Nightmares"?

Susan Sherrill, the new food editor at The Record of Woodland Park, contributed to this inadequate story, which is being reported three days after the Wayne man's death. We don't know the identity of the brain-dead weekend assignment editor, but demotion would be an appropriate penalty.

Precious A-1 space  is wasted again today on the slaying of a Seton Hall student from Virginia at a party in East Orange, the second day in a row this story was played out front by balls-less Editor Francis Scandale, who apparently believes crime news -- even from outside the circulation area -- is the new local news. 


The Local section is another disaster -- another slap in the face to readers -- from the desk of head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Loafs A Lot" Sykes.

A leering Mike Kelly weighs in with another smear column against the imam behind the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. A disaster drill is the major story on the front of the section. A drill. Not even a disaster. Where is the Hackensack news?

Without the backup of the assignment editor and the news copy desk, even the most talented reporter can turn in an incomplete story that leaves readers shaking their heads over the paper's knowledge of North Jersey. Sadly, most of the assignment and copy editors at The Record are brain-dead, as are their supervisors.

So it is with Staff Writer Ashley Kindergan's L-2 story on the closing of the Sol & Sol deli in Englewood after more than 60 years. Yes, the deli's whitefish was immortalized on "M*A*S*H" by Hawkeye, who was the main character on the TV series, not "one of the main" characters.


But Ashley, sweetheart, did you ask yourself, why Sol & Sol out of all those thousands of Jewish delis out there? It's because Alan Alda, the actor who played Hawkeye, lived for many years in Leonia, and undoubtedly ate regularly at the deli in neighboring Englewood.