Food editor's departure explained

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Friends of Bill Pitcher, The Record's food editor since June 2006, say he has been spending a lot of time in the Adirondacks region of New York State, helping to care for his seriously ill father-in-law, and has had to neglect his duties at the Woodland Park daily. 

That is also why he is leaving the job and moving his family there, friends say.

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.

What's wrong with this picture?

The front page of  The Record of Woodland Park today has a lead story on gay marriage, another on school funding and a large photo of  a racist and anti-Semite smoking a victory cigar after a mistrial. Why is this story on Page 1? Is it because over-the-hill Record reporter Mike Kelly was assigned to cover the trial in the city?

On Page A-2, a correction only serves to remind readers about the huge coverage of three families in far off Ringwood on the front page yesterday.

What's wrong with these pictures? More unusually large photos in the Local section tell you the lazy, incompetent editors failed for yet another day to assign any education, development or municipal stories about Hackensack and Teaneck, two of the premier towns in the paper's circulation area. (That's Teaneck Townhip Hall in the photo.)

On the front of Local, there are two photos of  a non-fatal truck accident taking up about half the page and inside, a third of the page is devoted to a photo of a vigil for drunken driving victims. When layout editors have to run photos this big, it means they were screwed by the Assignment Desk, run by Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes.

Also on the front, Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano has her fifth story since Oct. 30 about the teachers contract, but she has written nothing about how educators there propose to integrate elementary and middle schools. Of course, Publisher Stephen A. Borg didn't wait around for the solution, moving his family to Tenafly so his children wouldn't have to rub shoulders with blacks and Hispanics in Englewood, where he grew up in a Mac Daddy's East Hill mansion (smaller than the one young Stephen lives in now). Yet his wife Monica is Mexican.

Inside Local, Star-Ledger reporters filed two long Morris County fillers -- on an effort to save Greystone Park Psychiatirc Hospital and a pot trial. These stories would keep out Bergen County news, but there weren't enough Bergen County stories reported and written by Record reporters.

In Better Living, the pudgy, goy food editor, Bill Pitcher, has the nerve to highlight a wire service recipe for latkes made with butternut squash. That's food blasphemy.