Everyone drops the ball

Image by prefers salt marsh via Flickr

The Ramapo River is endangered by toxic dirt piles in Wayne, officials say.

The dominant story on Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park today is a sad tale of business owners who have for more than a decade resisted efforts to clean up piles of toxic dirt near a river. But despite the involvement of half a dozen staff members, this takeout puts the focus on dirt, not people.

Let's start with the stupid headline:

Court orders fail

to move mounds

"Mounds" are inanimate objects, and I'm sure the judge didn't order them to do anything. Why isn't the focus on the owners of the business, and why are their names buried on the continuation page, as if all of this is some sort of bureaucratic snafu?

It's bad enough the reporter can't get the father and son involved in the business, Allan Rombough Sr. of Medham and Andrew Rombough, to comment. But was an effort made to contact their attorney for comment? And why doesn't the reporter address an obvious question: Why didn't the state or the town hire a contractor to remove the dirt years ago, during flusher times, and bill the business?

The Local news section is another laughable effort from head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her minions. It's a typical Monday section: A charity walk and an awareness-raising walk are written about at great length and played out front, because that's all the desperate editors have.

An overturned car is the gee-whiz, "Accident of the Day" photo element on L-1, and more non-profit news fills all of L-3.


Columnist Mike Kelly is really angry at the imam behind the Lower Manhattan mosque proposal, and continues his smear campaign against him on L-1 today. 

Kelly's language is uncharacteristically harsh for a reporter who treats just about everybody else with kid gloves, including his pal, convicted felon and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie "The Crook" Kerik. Is this an anti-Muslim tirade?


Editor Francis Scandale got rid of the paper's only black, Hispanic and female news columnist, but kept Kelly the Mouse. Amazing.


Don't look for any Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood news today.

Newsroom nightmares

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Four reporters worked on today's front-page lead on the possible suicide of a well-known North Jersey chef, but it seems that none of them went inside his Fair Lawn restaurant on Sunday to interview the manager or staff. 

So readers are left in the dark. Is Joseph Cerniglia's death linked to his Campania restaurant again falling on hard times, as it did before it was turned around by Chef Gordon Ramsay on TV's "Kitchen Nightmares"?

Susan Sherrill, the new food editor at The Record of Woodland Park, contributed to this inadequate story, which is being reported three days after the Wayne man's death. We don't know the identity of the brain-dead weekend assignment editor, but demotion would be an appropriate penalty.

Precious A-1 space  is wasted again today on the slaying of a Seton Hall student from Virginia at a party in East Orange, the second day in a row this story was played out front by balls-less Editor Francis Scandale, who apparently believes crime news -- even from outside the circulation area -- is the new local news. 


The Local section is another disaster -- another slap in the face to readers -- from the desk of head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Loafs A Lot" Sykes.

A leering Mike Kelly weighs in with another smear column against the imam behind the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. A disaster drill is the major story on the front of the section. A drill. Not even a disaster. Where is the Hackensack news?

Without the backup of the assignment editor and the news copy desk, even the most talented reporter can turn in an incomplete story that leaves readers shaking their heads over the paper's knowledge of North Jersey. Sadly, most of the assignment and copy editors at The Record are brain-dead, as are their supervisors.

So it is with Staff Writer Ashley Kindergan's L-2 story on the closing of the Sol & Sol deli in Englewood after more than 60 years. Yes, the deli's whitefish was immortalized on "M*A*S*H" by Hawkeye, who was the main character on the TV series, not "one of the main" characters.


But Ashley, sweetheart, did you ask yourself, why Sol & Sol out of all those thousands of Jewish delis out there? It's because Alan Alda, the actor who played Hawkeye, lived for many years in Leonia, and undoubtedly ate regularly at the deli in neighboring Englewood.