More strikes against Governor Christie

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How relevant to the experience of most seniors is the lawsuit reported on Page 1 by Staff Writer Kibret Markos?

In a three-part series, The Record's Harvy Lipman is exposing how shabbily the state treats 40,000 developmentally disabled adults, but I'm not sure whose side he's on.


In the first and second parts Sunday and today, he refers to "expensive state institutions" -- code for programs staffed by the unionized public workers who are in Governor Christie's cross hairs.


Christie already has gutted the state Division of Parks and Forestry in a move to privatize the state park system and potentially limit public access, according to the Sierra Club's New Jersey Chapter (Page O-1 on Sunday).


Taking stock


Maybe it's time for interim Editor Doug Clancy and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes to sum up what Christie has accomplished, now that his first two years in office are nearly up.


Property taxes aren't any lower than when he took office. He's done nothing to improve the environment or mass transit. Local police chiefs are still making ridiculous salaries, many topping Christie's. The list goes on.


Today's paper is another yawner.


The editors virtually ignore issues involving older people, but today, the bottom of Page 1 has a story about a 78-year-old attorney who says he was cheated by a convicted scammer.


However, it's unclear just how many other older people are at risk of falling prey to the same insurance scheme.


Copping out


Sykes leads her Local section with a story about the Englewood schools superintendent, who apparently has run afoul of Christie's limit on salaries, but the editor continues to ignore why police chiefs' pay hasn't been capped (L-1).


Sykes' lazy assignment desk has so much trouble getting routine information on accidents and crime now, she may not want to antagonize police chiefs by exposing their astronomical salaries, sick-day payouts and so forth. 


Today, there really is a big development in Hackensack, Teaneck and other towns that don't make the news that often: All the branches and trees that fell during recent storms will be turned into free mulch for residents (L-1).


I call that mulch ado about nothing.


Dissing old people


Typical of the paper's attitude toward seniors is Staff Writer Mike Kerwick's apparent discomfort with the notion that older people exercise (F-1).


His story is so stiffly written, so phony that you know he's never stepped foot in a gym and seen the many people in their 60s, 70s and 80s exercising their asses off. 


On Sunday, in a story about computer tablets, Kerwick listed "sitcom characters who would buy this."


Where are the Better Living editors when he does such a lousy job on story after story? 

So many men with brains in their weiners

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Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, please join the growing line of men in and out of public life whose brains are in their penises.

You can read all about Weiner and his erection on A-1 and A-4 of The Record today, but doctors still haven't determined whether Publisher Stephen A. Borg and Editor Francis Scandale even have brains, let alone where they're located.

Is he bombed?

Scandale, for example, was blown away by the story on a small pipe bomb that exploded in a Fair Lawn neighborhood -- injuring no one -- so he made it the most important news of the day on Page 1 today.

He was scraping the bottom of the news barrel, it seems, judging from the huge photo that fills space on the jump page (A-7). 

The caption is ridiculously vague -- three ATF agents could be examining a dog turd for all we know. The one standing is either pointing at something or describing the size of someone's weiner to his colleagues.

Of course, the big, A-1 photo of an ATF agent looking under a pickup truck is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

Also on A-1 is Governor Christie's plan to spin off NJN, the state-owned TV and radio network, with the loss of more than 100 public jobs.

Christie argues NJN should be independent of state government, although the few times I've watched its TV news program, I was bored to tears. Jim Hooker, the anchor, has the demeanor of a funeral director.

Buried news

But why did Scandale bury on L-7 the guilty plea of a Ridgewood man who was a member of Bernard Madoff's inner circle? Eric Lipkin, 37, agreed to surrender his home and forfeit $1.4 million.

Or, on A-4, there's  a terrific photo of hotel maids and other workers outside of court, jeering Dominique Strauss-Kahn, another moron whose brain is in his penis.

The young, filthy rich Lipkin and the hotel-workers photo should have been outside, in place of the  pipe-bomb explosion that hurt no one.

There's seems to be a hitch in NJ Transit's plans to sell naming rights to the No. 780 bus between Englewood and Passaic city (A-7). 

The mostly minority riders hope the decrepit, decades-old vehicle will be dubbed, "The Heartbreak Local." 

What's she smoking?

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes devotes a good deal of her Local front today to the continuing battle to control weeds on Greenwood Lake.

The bi-state lake has to be the most documented body of water in North Jersey, judging from all the coverage of this very same problem in The Record over the years.

Hey, Deirdre, it's you and your assignment editors who need to be weeded out.

From hunger

In Better Living, Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill's major contribution every Wednesday is a single recipe from a free cookbook she promotes shamelessly.

So why is Staff Writer Mike Kerwick peddling another cookbook and book signing on F-1 today?

On F-3, how can a mac-and-cheese recipe with four tablespoons of butter and one cup of half-and-half be called "healthy," and why is nearly one-third of the page devoted to the cook?

Dreary Sunday, dreary Sunday paper

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The Record reports an MTV show "re-branded" the New Jersey shore.

Editor Francis Scandale did his best to match the Sunday paper to the dreary weather we've been having in North Jersey.

You know he's just collecting a paycheck when two of the three stories on Page 1 of The Record today are dry process stories -- on teacher tenure and the state's pension deficit.

The Woodland Park daily's consumer columnist doesn't help readers save money at the gas pump. And the restaurant columnist doesn't help readers navigate all the new restaurant discounts and promotions.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to see a story on the Local front today about raising cash with a garage sale by Staff Writer Jay Levin, the local obituary reporter.

Detour ahead

Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski has lost it. If you can figure out what he's saying on L-1 today -- especially the second paragraph with its double negative -- you should get a reward.

Town reporter Melissa Hayes has three stories in Local today, but I don't see anything by Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado or Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano.

Sleeper

In Business, a reporter seems to have fallen for a one-liner by a wealthy mattress executive, who claims his snoring keeps his wife up (B-6). Is it credible he hasn't found one of the over-the-counter snoring remedies?

In Better Living, it's bad enough the food editor promotes a new cookbook every week, but now The Corner Table Columnist Elisa Ung is shilling for a book on family recipes (F-1).

Exposing an 'expose'

In Opinion, a letter to the editor from Patrick Ragosta of Dumont dismisses two A-1 "exposes" last week on Bergen Community College President Jerry Ryan and, indirectly, today's silly column by Mike Kelly on O-1.

Ragosta points out Ryan raised $3.8 million in donations for the college in 2010 and put in for less than $30,000 in expenses.

In Travel, Staff Writer Mike Kerwick invokes that inane TV show, "Jersey Shore," in writing about his childhood summers in Manasquan (T-1). 

The shore, one of the state's great assets, doesn't need a TV show to give it legitimacy.

Editors continue to soil their clothes

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Water will fill the void left by destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Today's Page 1 story about a driver and driver's aide who forgot about a 4-year-old trapped on a school bus reminds me of how Publisher Stephen A. Borg took over in mid-2006 and forgot all about the editors trapped in the newsroom.

And like the boy, who urinated in his pants, Editors Francis Scandale, Deirdre Sykes, Barbara Jaeger, Liz Houlton, Tim Nostrand and others repeatedly soil their clothes in a journalistic sense with crappy reporting and writing -- leaving many readers howling in disbelief. 

Pipe dreams

The main element today likely is the first time a story about plumbing (for the 9/11 memorial waterfalls) has been splashed all over the front page of The Record of Woodland Park.

But you have to plow through all the reporting on nuts, bolts and pipes, and gee-whiz statistics before you learn -- deep into the text on the continuation page (A-6) -- that Staff Writer Shawn Boburg buried the human, emotional story of how one plumber's mother died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. 

The story also is silent on why hundreds of solar panels weren't incorporated into the design to drastically cut the estimated $1.7 million annual cost of electricity to move all that water. Or why plumbers charge so much.

Who is Boburg's clueless assignment editor?

Let's make a deal

Governor Christie is gambling that even legal bills of $3 million to $4 million would be justified, if he can get the Feds to accept half or a third of the $271 million debt left from the Hudson River rial tunnels he stopped dead in their tracks (A-1).

New Jersey lawmakers now are following the example of their counterparts in Wisconsin -- they're refusing to act on Christie's legislative initiatives -- pissing off the Republican bully (A-4). 

Baseball justice

A letter to the editor from Howard Shaw of Rutherford asks if Judge Donald Venezia was wearing a Mets or Yankee shirt under his robes when he gave Dwight Gooden a get-out-of-jail card for DUI driving with his 5-year-old in the back seat (A-10). 

Should Venezia be censured by the Supreme Court? Did the reporter who covered the April 15 hearing ask prosecutors if they could appeal the ruling?

Shell-shocked readers

You know the Local news report is in trouble, when Sykes has to put on her front page a story about a Northvale man who found a bazooka shell in his garage. 

Road Warrior John Cichowski writes another column from the comfort of his computer chair -- an AAA report on the cost of driving a car (L-1). 

Chick has asked Sykes for a cot and small refrigerator to make his long office stays more comfortable.

In place of municipal news, readers get a lot of police news and court stories throughout Local today.

Dishonest reporting

In a Better Living story on pitching your book idea in Ridgewood that ran Tuesday, Staff Writer Mike Kerwick fails to tell readers you have to buy a copy of "The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published" in order to qualify.

According to Bookends, only 20 people who buy the book will be able to pitch their ideas in person to the authors and a "major" publisher. That information also was missing from the story.

Life is easy for Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill, whose entire job seems to be publishing a single recipe on Wednesdays (F-1), plus writing a few items for the Second Helpings blog and tweeting her brains out.

Squelching reporters' instincts

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Under Editors Frank "Castrato" Scandale and Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, The Record of Woodland Park has become the kind of newspaper that waits for the news to arrive in neat packages, while pursuing ruinously expensive investigations that become mired in the editors' own laziness and incompetence.

Rather than ask reporters to do legwork, the clueless assignment desk sends them out to cover meetings, accidents and fires. They're never instructed to talk to residents of their town or even drive around and see what's new. Have you ever read a "Talk of The Town" from any of the 90 or so communities in the paper's circulation area?

Clerks deliver an endless stream of news releases, reports and studies that flow into the newsroom over fax machines, and these form the basis of many stories. Transportation reporters, for example, are loathe to ride and rate mass transit.

State, national and international wire service news fills the paper, but local aspects of those stories are ignored or covered routinely.

Look at today's dull front page. The sputtering economy is downplayed -- pushed down to the bottom of A-1, while high pay for special-ed CEOs leads the paper.

There's plenty of evidence the economic recovery has slowed in North Jersey, but local reporters take little notice, if they even visit the towns they are supposed to cover. Hundreds of new, unsold Toyotas have been lined up for weeks in a field behind a Hackensack dealer just a few blocks from the paper's old headquarters at 150 River St. The number of vacant storefronts or buildings continues to grow in business districts of Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other towns.

The Record has been running stories and columns about protests over planned Islamic cultural centers and mosques in Manhattan and across the country. But have Hackensack and Teaneck readers seen any stories about the growing Muslim populations in their towns? Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado was alerted about the opening of an Islamic cultural center (and possibly, a mosque) off Hudson Street in Hackensack a few years ago, but she simply ignored it.

On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, a reporter did a feature about Teaneck's new Muslim mayor and its Jewish deputy mayor, in a town with a large number of African-American and Orthodox Jewish residents. Sure, there was coverage of the mayor's selection by Teaneck reporter Joseph Ax, but it was handled routinely. 

Today's front page is dominated by a photo of Muslims in a Paterson mosque observing the start of Ramadan, but the story is crammed into L-3, in a Local section without any Hackensack or Teaneck municipal news. Greenwood Lake boaters get better coverage than Hackensack.

Giovanna Fabiano, the Englewood reporter, has two stories (L-1 and L-2) -- both from council meetings she covered Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

But when Englewood restaurateur Michel Bittan made headlines worldwide for having a relationship with one of those North Jersey-based Russian spies, Fabiano couldn't even get a comment from him and didn't pursue leads on his property holdings and influence in Englewood's struggling business district. 

Page L-3 also carries a column by Mike Kelly, who rehashes Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa's bid for the police union to pay his legal fees. He pushes around hundreds of words to recap Alvarado's stories, but is there anything new here? Why did this mouse of a journalist write this column, to fill space?

It has long been obvious to everyone except Scandale and Sykes that Kelly is completely useless as a columnist, but who did Scandale fire? It was Lawrence Aaron, the paper's only black columnist. Kelly's assignment editor appears to do only a spell check.

After Wednesday's Page 1 lead for Passaic County Sheriff Jerry "Inspector Clouseau" Speziale's unexpected departure for a much higher-paying police post -- two stories and a column -- an editorial today (A-18) puts in perspective the lousy job he has been doing running the office, and urges freeholders to take action. What a mixed message.

Maxell Corp. of America moved employees into the same Garret Mountain office complex in Woodland Park where North Jersey Media Group and its two daily newspapers have their headquarters. But is that any reason to run a story about Maxell across the top of L-9 today?

Better Living's Mike Kerwick apparently couldn't find any first-place barbecue competition winners, so the section cover today has a story on three also-rans from Bergen County who have won "trophies." 

Ex-Food Editor Bill Pitcher defended


Don't miss the comments on Monday's post, Bill Pitcher gets down with readers, including an anonymous one from someone who appears to be an insider. He or she also has some disquieting words about NJMG's employee-retirement fund.


Just click on the word "comments" at the end of that post.