Pope resigns, millions of Jews and Muslims shrug

Monday around 4 p.m., Euclid and Grand avenues, Hackensack: An NJ Transit driver strayed several blocks from his route, parked this bus near his apartment and went up for a cup of tea. When he returned munching on a crumpet, he started up the bus and drove to Prospect Avenue, where he turned left, presumably to reach Passaic Street.

The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is a big story for the media, and The Record today devotes much of the front page, three inside pages and an editorial to it (A-1, A-6, A-7, A-8 and A-9).

But the vast majority of readers couldn't care less.

Still -- like the 2014 Super Bowl and the recovery from Superstorm Sandy -- this story will allow The Record's local-news editors to continue to shirk their duty to readers of Hackensack and many other towns in North Jersey.

Trustee's arrest

On head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local front today, a story explores whether a Hackensack school board member will lose his seat, if convicted of an assault charge, but ignores all other aspects of Monday's Board of Education meeting (L-1).

Avalon, a 226-unit luxury apartment complex on Hackensack Avenue, will start renting apartments in May, and could add an unknown number of children to Hackensack's overburdened school system.

The Record has completely ignored the story. 

Corny demands filler 

There is so little local news today, layout editor Jim "Corny" Cornelius was forced to call upon the fender-bender photo staff for fillers.

Staff Photographer Tariq "Rollover" Zehawi was on ambulance-chasing duty in Hasbrouck Heights, and captured a non-fatal crash of a single SUV that landed on its roof (L-3).

Gee-whiz. Would you look at that. 

The copy editor needed to lengthen the photo overline, and called it a "morning rollover." Is that like "morning sex"?

Tailgate party

Cornelius was grateful for Zehawi's enterprise, and got another filler for L-7, a photo of a cop staring at the charred remains of the tractor portion of a tractor-trailer in Ridgefield.

The driver was practicing for 2014 Super Bowl tailgate parties by cooking hamburgers and ribs on the manifold of his idling engine, when the tractor caught fire.

Who is harness racing's rabbi?

Image by grover webb via Flickr

Does Editor Francis Scandale love going to the track? How about Staff Writer John Brennan, whose sentences rattle, roll and ramble? I know Local News Editor Jim "Corny" Cornelius and News Copy Desk Slot Vinny Byrne love the horses, but those two have no pull with Scandale.

Harness racing leads The Record of Woodland Park again today, as if racing rabbis Scandale and Brennan think readers are sitting on the edge of their seats for word of its fate. And the fate of New Jersey Network -- the only in-state source of televised Jersey news -- is relegated to Page A-3, again, instead of making the front page.

The headlines on the main, A-1 element fail to communicate immediately how violent a suspected purse snatcher allegedly was and the lead paragraph fails to clearly state bags were snatched from a moving SUV. The phrase "purse snatcher on wheels" would have worked well in the headline and the lead, but it doesn't appear until the continuation page, A-8.

Chief withholds report

In Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Staff Writer Joseph Ax continue to allow Teaneck Police Chief Robert Wilson to manage release of information on the death of Officer John Abraham nearly two months after he died in his police cruiser, which went violently out of control and slammed sideways into a telephone pole across from headquarters (L-3).

Abraham wasn't wearing a seat belt in his Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor -- a car with a long history of safety problems -- but Wilson refused to release a copy of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office accident report or the autopsy results.

Blast from the past

For a change, there is a lot of local news in Local today, but of particular interest on L-3 is the byline of Staff Writer Joseph Gemignani. He wrote a story about how Tenafly was in the early 1900s, when residents in the rural village raised animals and grew their own food. 

(That was long before Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who lives in a $3.65 million Tenafly mansion he bought with a company mortgage, folded the Food section.)

In the mid- to late 1980s, the veteran journalist worked at night in the Hackensack newsroom in the menial job of layout editor. When Gemignani wasn't at his desk drawing lines on his layout sheets, he could be seen at the copying machine -- his face expressionless, his life draining away -- the embodiment of the paper's age-discrimination policy.

Gemignani spent more than 15 years at The New York Times before returning to what is now North Jersey Media Group. It's not known whether Gemignani is on The Record staff or working at one of NJMG's many weeklies.