For commuters, no real change at NJ Transit

A bus broke down this morning in the Route 495 express lane to the Lincoln Tunnel, delaying commuters aboard hundreds of Manhattan-bound buses, above, including NJ Transit riders standing in the aisles. The Port Authority has ignored calls to add a second express bus lane into the city, and The Record's lazy editors and reporters have taken no notice.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

Dozens of commuters who couldn't find a seat on an NJ Transit train between Secaucus and New York's Penn Station were probably cursing Jim Weinstein on Wednesday morning.

Weinstein announced he will be leaving his job as executive director of NJ Transit on March 2, The Record reported on Wednesday (A-1).

But Weinstein, who is another of Governor Christie's many cronies, failed in his job long before Superstorm Sandy, when hundreds of rail cars and locomotives were destroyed, and the Super Bowl, when thousands of fans waited hours for trains.

Ignoring commuters

For years -- in a story The Record has never bothered to tell -- NJ Transit has been unable to provide a rush-hour seat for every commuter or guarantee their on-time arrival.

Why The Record's editors and reporters immediately went to bat for Super Bowl fans after years of ignoring North Jersey commuters is a question only the Woodland Park newsroom can answer.

The assignment editors and reporters don't seem to think they have anything in common with their readers who commute by bus or train.

In fact, Editor Marty Gottlieb and his many underlings appear to have contempt for readers who use mass transit, judging by the lack of coverage in the paper, especially in the Road Warrior column.

Drivers engage in the daily ritual of crawling down Route 495 to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel. This morning, a trip by car from Clifton to lower Manhattan took an agonizing 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Sky high salaries

Weinstein is being paid "upward of $261,000 a year," compared to Christie's $175,000, The Record reported.

He will be replaced at NJ Transit by Ronnie Hakim, another one of the governor's many cronies, who is in line for a $90,00o raise when she leaves the New Jersey Turnpike Authority -- by far the most expensive toll road in the tri-state area.

She now gets $174,000-a-year as executive director of the authority, which also runs the Garden State Parkway.

Early Alzheimer's

Meanwhile, Road Warrior John Cichowski finally emerges from hibernation to report on the challenges in the wake of last Thursday's nor'easter, which dropped 12 inches to 18 inches of snow on North Jersey (A-1 today).

The befuddled Cichowski doesn't have the courage to criticize state and municipal snow-removal crews for the half-assed job they did of clearing streets and highway ramps, and repairing potholes.

I also don't see any mention in his column today of pedestrians forced to put themselves in harm's way by walking in the street because of sidewalks and crosswalks still buried under snow.

The idiotic editors run a Page 1 photo today that tells readers nothing about the dangers of merging into high-speed traffic on highways when a mound of snow blocks the driver's vision or the acceleration lane suddenly disappears.

The mound of snow in the image blocks the view of the photographer (!!!), not the driver of the van shown merging onto Route 17 north in Upper Saddle River (A-1). 

Asylum's inmates

A news story and column on Page 1 today are about David Samson, the head of a powerful law firm who Christie named chairman of the patronage mill also known as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Check out the dated, unflattering column photo of Mike Kelly, whose shit-eating grin seems to undermine just about anything he has to say (A-1).

Burned-out Columnists Kelly and Cichowski appear to be just two of the patients in the newsroom's asylum.

A homeless man on the No. 2 train in Manhattan today had two hand trucks loaded with his belongings.

Sloppy writing, editing drag down daily report

The Modern, a 47-story residential building under construction in Fort Lee, overlooks three local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge at the center of the Bridgegate scandal. 

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

Stories on Page 1 of The Record continue to be poorly written and edited.

You'd think the front-page would get the most attention from assignment and news editors, copy editors and proofreaders, but A-1 today exhibits more sloppy journalism.

And it's not just the Monday editions, which are put out by a relatively smaller newsroom staff.

In today's story on the possible replacement of NJ Transit chief Jim Weinstein, he is described as "a low talker" in the first paragraph or "lede" in newspaper parlance (A-1).

The lede of a news story or column should sparkle, but this one is just puzzling.

'Hoisted'?

Later in the same paragraph, we learn Weinstein "had been steeped in nearly two decades of political and public service" -- like tea, I guess.

Then, the reporter tells us, Governor Christie "hoisted" Weinstein "to the helm of NJ Transit."

You'd hoist a dead body with ropes and pulleys, but I imagine Weinstein was elevated to or appointed executive director of the state mass-transit agency.

In the second paragraph, the word "tunnel" was dropped: "... constructing a commuter rail under the Hudson River."

Two tunnels

Once you plow through all of these errors (actually, the project was to build two tunnels), the reporter gets to the point: 

Weinstein backed Christie's decision to kill the Hudson River rail tunnels as a "loyal foot soldier, laying aside his own interests to deliver the orders of his boss."

This story, as well as all of the accounts about the Port Authority and the Bridgegate scandal, are nibbling at a single theme, which WNYC-FM (New Jersey Public Radio) has been exploring in recent weeks:

NJ Transit and the Port Authority have become political arms of the Christie administration.

Syrian refugees

In a second Page 1 story today, the reporter says Syrian refugees in North Jersey hear "horror stories" about "sons executed before their fathers" (A-8).

Does she mean "in front of" their fathers? 

The Port

Today and Sunday, The Record has been reporting on the possible involvement of Port Authority police officers in the George Washington Bridge lane closures (A-1).

Two news reports on Sunday raised "new questions about whether some officers at the bridge knew of the political motivations behind the lane closures" -- to punish Fort Lee's Democratic mayor for not endorsing the GOP bully for reelection, the paper reports today (A-1).

But on Jan. 17, I spoke to an employee of Babe's Taxi in Fort Lee who said he complained to a Port Authority police officer about the resulting gridlock and was told to send "a letter to Governor Christie."

The exit for the taxi company's garage is on Hudson Street, which provides three access lanes to the bridge's upper- level toll plaza. 

On A-8, a story on a journalism award to Staff Writer Shawn Boburg for his GWB stories ignores how little reporting he has done on the Port Authority's refusal to expand mass transit amid increasing traffic congestion.

Harvy Lipman

Non-profit news appears in the Local section today (L-3), but the reporter who covered the beat since 
2006 died "last week" at 63, the Woodland Park daily reported on Feb. 12 (L-6).

Harvy Lipman was hired after Publisher Stephen A. Borg directed the editors to create a beat to cover charities and news of non-profits.

If Lipman accomplished nothing else, he will be remembered for his June 2012 article, "Hardship Grows Amid Wealth" -- about how the recession "had left pockets of poverty in wealthy communities in North Jersey."

Lipman recounted "the experiences of people who made good livings and had risen through the middle class to obtain enough wealth to live in such communities as Mahwah and Ramsey, only to find themselves jobless, with depleted retirement accounts and living on food stamps," his obituary noted.

The article is all the more remarkable because it was written for The Record, where the editors have seemed completely undisturbed by Christie's assault on New Jersey's middle class or no-tax policies that have wrecked the state's economy.