Another puzzler from Liz Houlton's copy desk

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Deirdre Sykes' assignment desk is the laziest east of the Mississippi River.

Giving the disabled full access to public parks and nature areas is a worthy story, though I don't agree with Editor Francis Scandale that it should be Page 1 news today.

And the main headline over the story makes you wonder if Liz Houlton's news copy editors sleep on cots in The Record's Woodland Park newsroom, and never get to explore North Jersey.

Equal access for the disabled 

not easy in the wild

"The wild"? Where is that, in their imaginations? Is there any "wild" left in the region? 

Who approved that head? What's wrong with using the word "parkland," which appears in the lead paragraph?


Houlton is the production editor and in putting out the paper each night, she has left a steady trail of typos, and lame and inaccurate headlines, and photo captions.


Instead of enforcing the paper's style and editing stories for clarity and accuracy, the news copy editors have been reduced to the role of spell checkers.


Hail Christie

Governor Christie continues a public relations tour to repair his image -- in the wake of deep budget cuts and his refusal to raise taxes on millionaires -- and the paper faithfully quotes his self-serving pronouncements (A-3).

There is no truth to the rumor the governor has petitioned the courts to allow him to add a "t" to his first name: "Christ."

New Mahwah mall?

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' minions have been closely watching the controversy over rezoning 100 acres in Mahwah for commercial development (L-1), but Local hasn't breathed a word about the future of North Jersey Media Group's 20 acres along River Street in Hackensack.

The big story on L-1 today is about a bridge in Ho-Ho-Kus, but where's the update on replacement of the Court Street Bridge in Hackensack?

Local news columns are filled with police news, not municipal news of Teaneck, Englewood and other towns.

This helps cement the assignment desk's reputation as the laziest east of the Mississippi River.

Dumbing down

In a restaurant review  on Friday, Staff Writer Elisa Ung describes Honey Mediterranean Gourmet and Market as a "little dining room attached to [a] Persian grocery store."

Then, she treats readers as if they are simpletons by adding the Teaneck restaurant wouldn't be "appropriate for anyone looking for a more formal setting."

Why not use that space for telling readers whether the place serves organic or naturally raised food -- not for stating the obvious?

Big victory for U.S., big defeat for N.J.

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The Record's large staff guarantees one story for each Ho-Ho-Kus resident.

A huge defeat for the people of New Jersey is buried by all the Osama bin Laden reaction news in The Record today.

Governor Christie has put all the pieces in place to remove the last minority member of the state Supreme Court in September after getting rid of the only African-American justice last year.

Incredibly, the story on A-3 and a political column on L-1 today portray a deal on court appointments as a victory for Democrats -- ignoring the resulting loss of both minority members.

Christie dumped the only black on the court; Editor Francis Scandale dumped the paper's only black columnist. 

Christie is poised to replace the only Hispanic on the court; Scandale busted the paper's only Hispanic columnist to reporter before he left in disgust.

Oh, the triteness!

Page 1 of the Woodland Park daily supposedly is for the best the paper has to offer -- not for the hackneyed words and phrases Mike Kelly has been pushing around for years.

Check out some of the columnist's gems:

"Jackhammers rattled. Cement mixers crunched gravel." He has these on a save/get key for any column on Ground Zero reconstruction. 

"Amid the syncopated din...." Is a conductor orchestrating the work?

"A day of passions that seemed to switch back and forth like wiper blades." Am I reading the Road Warrior?

More big flaws

I couldn't read any more, so I looked at the A-1 photos. 

The one with Kelly's column looks posed, and the one at the top of the page -- of President Obama and his national security team -- seems to have an incorrect caption.

TV news reported time and again the president and his team were watching live video of the raid on Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. 

The Record's caption says they are "getting updates on the mission."

The lead front-page story with that photo -- headlined "How we got bin Laden" -- is from The Washington Post, but doesn't mention what day the raid took place.

Second-class Muslims

A much better choice for the front page -- in place of Kelly and his leering image -- would have been the L-1 story on North Jersey Muslims hoping they'll no longer be viewed as terrorists.

Besides Kelly's lame column, the stories by the local staff, the editorial, cartoon and Op-Ed columns -- all under the misguided direction of Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes -- are just overload. 

Who could -- or wants to -- read all of this?

The Woodland Park daily just piles on top of all the coverage readers saw on TV late Sunday night and all day Monday. And it comes hard on the heels of all the nauseating coverage of the royal wedding.

One man, one story

The few non-Bin Laden stories in Local include one rich man's rant about a solar panel on the telephone pole outside his Ho-Ho-Kus bedroom (L-3).

Maybe if he took care of his wife's needs in the bedroom, he wouldn't  be looking out the window so much. Sykes and Staff Writer Evonne Coutros should know better than to pass off this nonsense as municipal news.

No local news today

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The front page of The Record of Woodland Park screams no meaningful local news today, with a lead story on a non-fatal standoff with police in lily white Ho-Ho-Kus. How did this story get on A-1? In some lazy editor's opinion, the photos were better than those with a far more compelling story, the arrest of a suspect in the Jan. 24 immigrant-on-immigrant slaying of a Garfield deli clerk.

The biggest photo with the standoff story is the perp on a gurney. Real dramatic, don't you think? Three other photos show police officers and police vehicles.

But who isn't moved by the big L-1 photo of the clerk's grieving father, owner of the deli, who told a reporter he visits his son's grave every day since the slaying nearly 10 months ago? The entire Local section contains eight inconsequential Bergen stories and photos, two less than from Passaic and Morris counties.

There is no news from highly diverse Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood, a trend that accelerated when The Record moved its newsroom many months ago out of Bergen County, to the former West Paterson. Yet, on A-2, the Borg family still lists the newspaper's address as 150 River St., Hackensack.

A letter to the editor on A-11 today suggests the nation launch a "Cash for Pounds" program to attack the obesity epidemic, a subject the newspaper has been trying to ignore for more than a decade. Maybe some of the obese -- or verging on obese -- editors will read this letter and launch an obesity project.

That surely would be of greater service to readers than the interminable investigation now in its third year that is being led by Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, head of the local news assignment desk. This probe has sucked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries and tied up several reporters, including Monsy Alvarado, the woman who is supposed to be covering Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895.