Hackensack gets wiped off the map

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Malcolm A. Borg, chairman of North Jersey Media Group, grew up in a big house at Summit and Fairmount avenues in northern Hackensack (map). Today, "Mac" is one of a couple of dozen people left at The Record's landmark building not far away.

When you drive by 150 River St., you might mistaken the parking lot for an annex of nearby Hackensack Toyota. The lot, once crowded with employees' cars, is filled with new but unsold Japanese cars -- hundreds of them.

Now look at the lead Page 1 story today on cuts to North Jersey high school athletics. It doesn't even mention Hackensack. The entire Local section also ignores the city where The Record was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years.

The only news from Englewood is a crime story. Teaneck? Not today. Nada. Zilch. 

But for the second day in a row, a columnist blasts Governor Christie for forcing NJ Transit to propose 25% fare hikes and service cuts. This hits the pocket of Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin, who commutes to Woodland Park by train, and he's pretty upset.

Doblin portrays Christie as an imperious ruler who doesn't leave his private car to see how the people live or how hard it is for them to get around using mass transit.

All in all, a pretty skimpy paper, especially if you live in Bergen County.

What took them so long?

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Two columnists for The Record of Woodland Park surprised me today with radical departures from their usual drivel.

On the front of Local, Road Warrior John Cichowski finally came to the defense of NJ Transit bus riders and slammed Governor Christie for forcing a planned 25% fare hike. And on the front of Better Living, Restaurant Reviewer-on-leave Elisa Ung finally found a meat purveyor who lives up to the word she's been throwing around indiscriminately for a couple of years -- quality.

I have no doubt Cichowski will return to writing about every idiotic driver who e-mails him, every pothole, every street and every lamp post on every highway, but maybe, maybe, he'll actually get off his duff and ride one of the contraptions that pass for a local bus. That would really put the fare hike and service cuts into perspective.

And does one profile of a butcher by Ung make up for all the times she declared conventionally raised beef served in a restaurant or sold elsewhere as "quality" or "chef's quality" or some other promotional nonsense that distorted reality and insulted the intelligence of her readers? No. But maybe it's a start.

Of course, through all these months and years that Cichowski and Ung knew not of what they wrote, where were their editors? Where was head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and where was Food Editor Bill Pitcher, reading this tripe and sending it along the production chain with nary a question, nary a concern, secure in their own ignorance?

Good to see on-the-ball reporting

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The lead story on the front of The Record of Woodland Park today isn't just another routine recitation of storm damage you usually find in the paper. This report says the nor'easter felled a tree that killed two Teaneck pedestrians on Saturday in an accident many people fear.

But there is real detail here: The victims appear to have been returning from synagogue services, so their orthodoxy prevented them from driving and exposed them to the dangers of such a wind-driven storm. You don't see this kind of on-the-ball reporting in the former Hackensack daily every day, hampered as it is by a clueless assignment desk under Deirdre Sykes. 

The rest of Page 1 carries another substantial take-out on the deficit-ridden state pension system by Staff Writers Elise Young and Dave Sheingold, who have been following this story for months. It seems Christie Whitman, the former Republican governor, is at the root of today's problems.

Unlike Young and Sheingold, Columnist John Cichowski is late to the debate -- this one over the sorry state of mass transit in North Jersey. On the front of Local, The Road Warrior finally has one the few columns he's written in more than six years on long-suffering bus riders, who now face 25% fare hikes and service cuts -- and he still refuses to check out such decrepit local buses as the 780 that runs from Englewood to Hackensack and Passaic city.

Cichowski's column fleshes out the lead Opinion piece by Zoe Baldwin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. She writes that drivers should shoulder more of the state's fiscal burden -- an argument that hasn't been adopted by the paper's editorial writers, who, like Cichowski, appear to be held hostage by motorists.

If you want to throw up, try to get through Mike Kelly's column on the Opinion front about Ground Zero. Read this, for example:

"Ground Zero and all its shadowy issues have become like a ghost in a Shakespearean drama that just can't seem to find its bearings. All Ground Zero needs to become an even greater tragedy is the modern equivalent of ancient Rome's Marcus Brutus."

Help! I can't read more. I have to go to the bathroom and barf.