Oh shit, readers mutter, Kelly is back

An example of a heart attack shows plaque buildup on vessel walls. (Wikipedia)

After an absence of many weeks, the unflattering photo of Staff Writer Mike Kelly and his column appear again in The Record.

Today, his shit-eating grin is on Page 1 with another in a long line of poorly written columns, this one a breathless account of "a mystery" left behind by Superstorm Sandy.

Kelly has been away while he recovered from a heart attack, but his near-death experience hasn't done much for his style.

Out of ideas

Here's another overwritten column that poses an endless series of questions that bother no one but Kelly, who long ago ran out of ideas.

A natural would to be to write about his heart surgery and to try and educate readers about coronary health, a subject newspapers and their food writers devote little room to. 

Hey, Editor Marty Gottlieb, what's the big deal about a firefighter rescuing an elderly woman from the "knee-high floodwaters in Little Ferry"?

Compared to all of the death and destruction on Oct. 29 and 30, this was a minor act, just another instance of a first-responder doing his job.

Everyone is a 'hero'

But Kelly can't resist hailing the firefighter as a hero, and here is an entire column guessing at the rescued woman's identity. 

The hack columnist even gets 9/11 into the column.

Kelly calls Sandy "a dramatic disaster."

Tell that to the survivors who lost loved ones. Tell that to shore residents whose homes were literally blown away. 

Is "dramatic" really the right word? 

Basically, Kelly spins an entire column out of The Record photographer failing to get the identities of a firefighter and an old woman, and minor events that are nearly two months old.

Chief word pusher 

Kelly didn't lose his ability to push around words.

He describes "universal pain and fear" on Oct. 30, the day flood waters rose in Little Ferry, Moonachie and other towns, and "the heartbreak that would mount in scores of communities in the weeks that followed."

"First responders," he writes, "left their own damaged homes to pick up the pieces of broken lives."

Where are the violins?

As usual, no editing

And his A-1 column goes on and on, taking up more than a third of A-8.

Where are the editors who allow this tripe into the paper? Who is Kelly's assignment editor, and why isn't anyone editing him? 

Is it head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza or one of their minions who spell-check this garbage and unleashed it on readers?    

New park entrance?  

In Local, readers get to see some of the terrific staff photos that ran in 2o12 (L-3), a welcome break from all the ambulance chasing that photographers did under orders from Sykes and Sforza.

One of the photos shows Overpeck County Park, reminding readers how the paper hasn't reported on the recent opening of a new entrance to the New Overpeck.

A long, two-lane road passes over two unusual wood-truss bridges, whose warm tones seem especially appropriate in a park setting.

Editors' gift to readers

Today's paper is a Christmas gift that will keep on repeating like a bad meal -- thanks to Gottlieb, Sykes, Sforza and Kelly.

Happy holidays! 

We'll tell you about it when we want to

Image via Wikipedia

On Page 1 or in the Local section, stories are reported days, weeks, even months after they happened. Editors and reporters at The Record of Woodland Park give the impression they don't want to rush around handling breaking news, lest their workload become too onerous. Are readers less informed? The editors say, We don't care.


Today, A-1 brings us a lot of soft news, but the most important story to homeowners in North Jersey is skimpy on details. 

The main story reports bounty hunters have to carry licenses. The first ones were issued "several months ago."  Why take up all this space for a story of interest to only a few of us? Is this the work of Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale?


In the story about towns heading off tax appeals by reassessing homes, officials say the new home values -- adjusted to current market value -- would be "fairer" to taxpayers, but doesn't go on to say whether that means tax bills will be lower, too. No examples are cited from towns that have already reassessed -- home value and tax bill before, home value and tax bill after. Why skimp on this story, and cover the bounty hunters so lavishly?

If you doubt, Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin has rolled over and played dead amid all of Governor Christie's budget cutting -- which has targeted women, schoolchildren, seniors and other middle- and working-class residents -- read the limp editorial on A-10 today. Here's the last sentence:

"We can only hope -- and keep close watch over our elected officials, and pressure them to retool these reforms if the costs are too dear and the benefits too little."

Hope? Too dear? Where is the newspaper's outrage, its thunder? It's not enough to have a hard-hitting cartoonist like Margulies, who today blasts Christie for "gambling with women's health."  You can just see Doblin sipping tea and eating small, crust-less sandwiches while he composed or edited this pathetically weak editorial, which makes no mention of huge tax breaks for the Borgs and other millionaires.


Charles Saydah, editor of letters to the editor, is a member of Doblin's staff who at first glance has one of the cushiest jobs at the newspaper. If he has other duties, I am unaware of them.

When the "lifer" worked in Hackensack, he always had time for a midday jog over the bridge to Bogota. (He ran in the street, not on the sidewalk, and I almost ran him down one day near the Afghan restaurant in Teaneck.)

I don't know how Saydah avoided joining the exodus of workers over 50 that Publisher Stephen A. Borg set into motion when he took over in mid-2006. Saydah used to work in an office at the rear of the newsroom, and maybe Borg didn't know he existed. 

After I left The Record in May 2008, I sent in at least one letter noting the decline of local news, but Saydah ignored me.  
 

Maybe the letter editor is doing a really great job, but you'd have to question that after reading a letter published Tuesday on A-8 from Gail C. Dever, a Bergenfield woman who tried a number of roads but couldn't find the entrance to the new Overpeck Park. 

You'd think Saydah would have looked up the stories on the opening of the park and written an editor's note with the answer, but the letter ran without comment.

In Local, Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado finally gets around to reporting school board appointments made at meetings in June and July, and the need for re-votes. This is the third school board story or brief Alvarado has written since July 30, but she has gone 11 months without writing about the city's schools. 


Maybe head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes has told her poor baby chick not to overwork herself, and see if she can go a year or 13 months without writing about the schools.


On L-3, another big story on "American Idol" auditions in the Meadowlands fills space that could carry Englewood or Teaneck news, but there is none today. 

On L-6, space was especially tight after cramming in a huge photo of a man at a lectern AND an 18-inch story and photo on the stabbing of a Manchester Regional High football player in Clifton. Layout editors had to omit the "Brief Tributes"heading over two expanded obituaries at the top of the page.
 

Enough construction updates already

Image via Wikipedia

As if we didn't read enough about Ridgewood in Monday's paper, here is another detailed story in The Record of Woodland Park about a construction project in the village. The assignment desk and reporter take what is basically a construction update and pad it mercilessly, while trying to give it a negative spin by quoting residents whose lives are disrupted by the project.

The piece on today's Local front is by Staff Writer Tom Davis, a transportation reporter infamous for his attacks on light rail, including its planned extension to Englewood and Tenafly.  


In today's piece on making the Ridgewood train station handicap accessible, he pulls out all the stops: Cranes "tower over this bucolic community." "Stores and shops dating ... to the 19th century are visible to train passengers." There's more:

"Tubes, beams and pipes are scattered around the site as cranes and bulldozers move quickly through concrete rubble."

This is great reporting, but Hackensack readers might be asking themselves why they've never seen a story on a permanent replacement for NJ Transit's Anderson Street Station, a historic structure that burned down, what, two years ago? Rail riders have had to make do with a crummy bus shelter since then. 



It's a marvel how head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes and such minions as Dan Sforza get reporters to do construction-update fillers and dress them up as real stories, while continuing to ignore news from Hackensack and other Bergen towns. Or did The Record miss the project in Ridgewood until now?


Monday was the first day since July 17 without coverage of the parking-garage collapse in Hackensack. The stories, as numerous as they were, often didn't contain even basic information, such as whether Prospect Avenue remains closed. It does. And the stories also overlooked major information, such as the massive project being pushed for 329 Prospect, diagonally across from the high-rise where the garage collapsed.


A letter to the editor today from Thomas J. Lyndon of Hackensack (A-8) reports that "for the past year," the city Board of Adjustment has been considering more than a dozen variances for a 20-story, acute-care hospital with "five levels of underground parking."


I guess we haven't read about this proposal -- especially relevant in view of the garage collapse -- from Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado, because apparently she has been ordered by Sykes to ignore all Hackensack news outside of the legal troubles of suspended Police Chief Ken Ziza.


Today's front page is an all-New Jersey affair except for a big photo of soldiers in Afghanistan, an image that looks posed. The editors, desperate for a color photo, again demonstrate how A-1 design trumps journalism. Were there no Jersey photos worthy of Page 1?


Here's belated recognition for Staff Writer Jeff Pillets, whose A-1 story on Sunday exposed the waste and corruption behind the making of the New Overpeck County Park, which was 60 years in the making. However, I did think he was nitpicking over erosion and slow-growing grass.


Still, will anything come of his story? The contracts have been awarded, millions of dollars in taxpayers' money have been  wasted. Maybe his story would have changed things if it was written a year ago or two years ago.

(Photo: Original Anderson Street Station in Hackensack.)