Finally, editors rate our lousy transportation system

Commuters muscle their way through doors at Penn Station in Manhattan.

One Friday night in September, the line at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan stretched to the level below where commuters board NJ Transit buses.

Rush-hour traffic comes to a dead stop on the Garden State Parkway.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

Today's front-page story on prospects for a higher gasoline tax is the first in many years to rate the state's transportation system as "among the worst in the country with little money for repairs and improvement."

Typically, the editors of The Record have responded to increasing road, bus and rail congestion by assigning reporters to cover transit-agency meetings.

Today's Page 1 story is tricked out with photos and a graphic, but not a single quote from a commuter experiencing the crush of rush-hour travel.

Christie apologists

Much more is missing. 

Soon after he took office, Governor Christie launched his war against the middle class by pulling the plug on the Hudson River rail tunnels, the first major expansion in decades.

Christie also has shied away from pressuring the Port Authority to expand the bus system by adding a second, reverse lane into the Lincoln Tunnel.

Commuters' viewpoint?

Instead of running inane photos of fender benders to fill the Local news section, the editors could run photos of commuter hell, and actually quote drivers and rail and bus riders on what they experience.

Then, officials may finally be able to muster the political will to pass a higher gas tax, fix our roads and expand our transit system.

Good, bad reporting

Last year, Staff Writer Karen Rouse did tackle the reasons for the big crowds at Penn Station in Manhattan, but that followed a number of anti-light rail takeouts from Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza and his then-pet transporation reporter, Tom Davis.

Turn the page 

One glance at the unflattering photo of Mike Kelly, complete with shit-eating grin, and just a few words like "chortle" and "beery" are enough to turn off readers to whatever he is writing about, as in today's A-1 column on a state song.

Three corrections stand out on A-2 today, two of them from the thin Travel section and the idiotic Readers on the Road feature.

Hackensack news

On the Local front today, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes presents the first Hackensack news since March 22, a story on plans for a new Anderson Street rail station.

The story makes no attempt to explain why it has taken more than four years for NJ Transit to unveil plans for a new station, which was destroyed by a fire and explosion on Jan. 10, 2009.

And the story fails to note that in its final years, the station's waiting room was closed, and ticket machines were outside, where sun often prevented commuters from reading their screens and buying tickets.  

That meant they had to pay a surcharge to buy a ticket on board the train.

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.

Clumsy headline ruins Page 1

Lance Armstrong in the prologue of the Tour de France in July 2004 in Liege, Belgium (Wikipedia)

It's unclear how Editor Marty Gottlieb justifies covering nearly half of the front page today with two sports columns and a photo of that dope, Lance Armstrong, who turned the Tour de France into the Tour de Lies.

But any reader interest is squelched by the clunky headline from the copy and production desk of Editor Liz Houlton, The Record's Queen of Errors.

Here's the headline:

Cheater and inspiration

The lack of parallel construction completely throws readers. 

"Cheating and inspiring" or "From hero to liar" would have been better, but almost any other headline would have drawn rather than repelled readers.

How screw-ups like this happen time and again on the premier page of the paper is unknown. 

This, after all, is presumably the best story of the day, according to the sports-obsessed Gottlieb. 

Maybe the solution is to cut the clumsy, error-prone Houlton and her six-figure salary, just as the solution to a much better Local news section is to force head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes into early retirement.

Reporter is shut-in

On the front of Local, Staff Writer John Cichowski -- the so-called commuting columnist -- can't be bothered to report on the mass-transit crisis brought on by Superstorm Sandy.

Today, the Road Warrior column is filled with more inane questions from drivers about license plates and the MVC, written from the comfort of his desk chair  (L-1).

Senior moment

And on L-9 today, Your Money Columnist Kevin DeMarrais gets into the act by publishing a reader's question on E-ZPass charges he didn't recognize.

His consumer advice used to be called Your Money's Worth.

Most of DeMarrais' column is about those complex gym contracts, but he apparently doesn't know seniors like him can get the last laugh.

Some Medicare supplemental health insurance policies include free memberships in 24 Hour Fitness and other gyms. LOL.

A valuable lesson for all

Image via Wikipedia

The danger of promising education coverage "every day," as The Record of Woodland Park has been doing for a few years, is not delivering and alienating readers, some of whom just stop reading the paper.

In the Local section today, we learn that a city of Passaic educator has applied for a grant to give every sixth-grader a laptop. A second education story was supplied by the Star-Ledger and doesn't mention Bergen, Passaic or Morris counties, The Record's circulation area.

My son is in his third year of attending public school in Hackensack, and I do not recall seeing any stories about his schools since we moved here in August 2007. Oh, wait. Isn't that the approximate time Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, has been sidetracked on an inane, interminable investigation championed by her boss, Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes?

Has any Hackensack educator applied for a grant to give laptops to sixth- or seventh-graders in Hackensack, the former home of The Record?

The rest of the Local section has no news about Hackensack, unless you count volunteers who spruced up Friendship House in the city, or about Teaneck, Englewood, Ridgewood, Westwood or a host of other Bergen towns.

The so-called "Newstracker" feature at the bottom of L-1 inexplicably looks ahead to the sentencing of a Paterson man who killed his distant cousin. Yet, Saturday's paper didn't report any sentencings in the criminal courts of Bergen, Passaic or Morris counties -- even though Friday is sentencing day in Superior Court.

So was no one sentenced or did The Record's editors keep those stories out of the paper, as they have in the past, so there wouldn't be so much crime news to upset readers?

A Paterson woman who died in an arson fire made front-page news today, but I'll bet that was only because the editors got a spectacular photo of a non-fatal fire in another town they could run above the fold.

The features section called Better Living (not Better Eating) has the usual tips on how to carve a turkey today, but the paper has been silent so far on the merits of finding a turkey that was raised naturally, without antibiotics and animal by-products, or one that hasn't been bred to have a broad breast of tasteless white meat.

Back to journalism as usual

The Record today returned to journalism as usual in its local news coverage of Hackensack. For residents who saw a brief story about a food drive by the Police Department yesterday -- breaking a35-day news dry spell -- the only Hackensack news today is an eight-paragraph story and photo of  an apartment fire. 

That's not the kind of news me and tens of thousands of other residents want from the former Hackensack daily.  

Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, has a byline today on a story about alleged thefts by an ex-fire chief in Lodi. The headline says "up to $75,000," but the story says "believed to be under $75,000."

I haven't seen anything in The Record about the new homeless shelter next to the county jail in Hackensack. The building appears to be complete and when I drove by there yesterday, I saw four or five people who might be homeless lounging on sun-splashed benches and what looked like a loading dock. Yellow, plastic tape blocked a driveway to the parking lot, which was empty, though a few weeks ago, it was full.

On another local story, which is promoted on Page 1 and played on the Local section front, I don't recall seeing a story about the murder of a soldier from Teaneck on Nov. 6. The husband, from Englewood, apparently committed suicide. This story reports on the soldier's funeral today.

On Page L-2, "daily education coverage" today includes a look at the Ringwood school system. In the more than two years and three months I have lived in Hackensack, I can't recall any stories about the school system my 12-year-old son attends.


There are also stories from Pequannock, Wanaque and Woodland Park, the new home of The Record and the Borg family's privately held North Jersey Media Group.