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.

Why is any of this on Page 1 today?

Image via Wikipedia

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., second from right, during a Cuban Day
 Parade. Do readers really care how much campaign cash he has amassed?

Readers surely are bewildered yet again by the choice of Page 1 stories for The Record's Sunday edition -- once the premier edition of the week.


Judging from the turnout of police officers shown in the A-1 photo, you'd think a chief of state died instead of an off-duty Newark detective who probably would still be alive, if a sleazy Paterson strip club had hired another off-duty cop as security.


Victim, not hero


Is an off-duty cop who was walking a dancer to her car at 3 in the morning Monday -- and who was shot by a robber before he could draw his service weapon -- really a "true hero," as the headline says?


Or, was he the victim of a predator who robbed another dancer only 25 minutes earlier outside another club in a city cursed by a Police Department with a miserable record of controlling gun violence?


Campaign trash


I read every word of the front-page story on Sen. Robert Menendez's mountain of campaign cash, but wondered why Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson didn't discuss attempts to reform a corrupt system that gives the upper hand to special interests.


A political story that belongs on Page 1 -- one readers of The Record will never see -- is how partisan rhetoric has paralyzed Congress and literally stopped progress.


Changes to the Roman Catholic Mass on the front page -- in one of the most religiously diverse regions of the world? 


Boring readers


Hey, interim Editor Doug Clancy, didn't you have anything of general interest for A-1? Why isn't this story on the Religion Page?


This is only your second Sunday paper, but you're boring readers to death. And it's not as if Francis "Frank" Scandale is a tough act to follow as editor.


On A-2, the same headline appears twice in the People In The News column -- more great quality control by Liz Houlton's news copy desk.


Out of control


Jeez. Look at the Road Warrior column on the front of Local today -- the section that is the pride and joy of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes.


Why is Staff Writer John Cichowski focusing on a New Milford resident who was stopped for driving more than 90 mph in Georgia??? What does that have to do with the North Jersey commuting problems he is supposed to be writing about?


I continue to look in vain for Hackensack news.


More indigestion


On the Better Living front, here's another moronic Sunday column from Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung, this one on a waitress' pet peeves (F-1).


Someone should tell waitress Karin Frei to direct her anger at her boss, who pays her slave wages and puts the burden on customers to tip her sufficiently so she makes a decent living. 


Stop bitching about customers. You're lucky to have a job.


Isn't it rich to see Travel Editor Jill Schensul promoting inter-generational travel from a newsroom that favors younger employees over veterans, with only a few exceptions (T-1)?

Grown men behaving badly

Image by dougtone via Flickr

You can always count on Editor Francis Scandale to throw readers a curve.

In a front-page photo in The Record today, Governor Christie is hunched behind home plate at his son's baseball game after arriving in Flemington on four wheels, not descending from the sky in a helicopter (A-1 and A-3).

Christie is doing his best imitation of a big black bear.

But in an A-11 editorial bemoaning the "nation's deadly obesity trend," you won't find anything about what New Jersey is or isn't doing to fight overeating or any mention of how Christie slashed food programs for low-income schoolchildren.

Once over lightly

And, of course, Christie's weight and the poor example he is setting are taboo subjects in a newsroom run by Editor Francis Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, who has struggled with her own food demons for decades.

Today's front page is all about grown men and women behaving badly -- in the newsroom, on high school ball fields, in the bedroom and elsewhere.

At the top of A-1, business owners who refuse to hire more workers are referred to collectively as "the U.S. economy."

Elsewhere on Page 1, Scandale bores readers with another politician who hid his mistress' pregnancy, and overreacts to the E. coli outbreak in Europe.

Today's front page

Image via Wikipedia

The museum of news in Washington, D.C.

Here is today's front page from the Newseum Web site:


Page 1 of The Record

The front page of the Woodland Park daily is a mix of breaking news and an expose of how some public official spent tax dollars to live high on the hog.

With the story on the blizzard, a photo showing cars moving over a snow-covered street says, "Cars navigating snow-covered streets in Englewood," using the plural "streets" even though only one street is shown.

What's shown in the photo is so obvious, the news copy editor breaks a cardinal rule: You don't tell readers what they can see for themselves. Production Editor Liz Houlton, who supervises the news copy desk, must have been napping at her computer again.

More really bad fiscal news

Image via Wikipedia

The Feds may withhold aid to NJ Transit and apply it to the state's $271 million debt.

Page 1 and Page A-4 of The Record of Woodland Park today contain more really bad news about Governor Christie's management of state finances. 

The Republican bully is not only being hit up for $271 million the Feds say they spent before the governor killed the Hudson River tunnel project (A-1), but now, it seems, New Jersey blew another application for federal education aid. 

Last time, it was $400 million in "Race to the Top" funds. This time, the state won't get $14 million to help charter schools with start-up costs.

And just on Monday, The Record's front page painted such a rosy picture of how charter schools could blossom under the encouragement and support of the Christie administration.

Managing the news

Christie has turned his back on a millionaires' tax or raising the low gasoline tax to fatten the state's bottom line -- decisions that have critics questioning his ability to manage the state's fiscal crisis. But he hasn't lost his ability to manage the news. 

Staff Writer Karen Rouse apparently doesn't have the muscle to get any intelligent comment from the governor's spokesman and chief spin doctor, Michael Drewniak, on this enormous $271 million debt. She couldn't even get anything from NJ Transit, which referred her to the Governor's Office.


Rouse's story comes six days after the $271 million demand letter was sent to the state mass-transit agency. But the amount of the bill has been known since Nov. 28. 

It's only in the last paragraph readers learn Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., is trying to get the debt reduced after what his spokesman calls Christie's "disastrous decision" to kill a project that would have doubled the number of NJ Transit trains into Manhattan.

The state's finances are so bad, another Page 1 story reports, $150 million in promised aid was never sent to the New Jersey Cord Blood Bank in Parmaus.

Desperate editors

Editor Francis Scandale goes all artsy-fartsy on us today, with a huge Page 1 photo of a "lost" Picasso. This story is of so little interest to North Jersey, the stand-alone photo and caption must surely be the act of a desperate man, and a slap in the face to the paper's talented photographers.


Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section today has little in the way of municipal news, and nothing from Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood. But you'll find stories about Verona's water, a fire in Rockaway Township, where the paper is printed; and Bergen Community College.


In Better Living, food news consists of a single, wire-service recipe. Monday's section also had a single, wire-service recipe.

Another odd newspaper

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When I first looked at the big, black headline on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today -- "66 killed in July" -- I thought, The heat did that? Then, I saw the word "Afghanistan" in smaller headline type and focused on the gauzy photo, which resembles art from the battlefield. I immediately lost interest, having seen TV reports on the U.S. death toll there all this week.


Then, to the left, an A-1 story about a 105-year-old woman from Englewood who has been chosen for a study on longevity and genetics carries the byline of Staff Writer Giovanna Fabiano, who covers the city. It is the second day in a row Page 1 has a story about a black person who didn't commit a crime.

Somehow, the reporter manages to avoid any discussion of the segregation this black woman experienced in Memphis and 1950s Englewood, when people of color could look forward to little more than a job as a maid or chauffeur for one of the rich families who lived on "The Hill." Of course, the East Hill is precisely where former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg bought a big house years later and raised the two spoiled brats now running the former Hackensack daily. He made sure to send his kids to private schools.


At least, Fabiano is being consistent. She has completely ignored the segregated elementary and middle schools in Englewood, or reported on efforts to integrate them, if any. Were those schools the reason Publisher Stephen A. Borg bought a mansion in Tenafly?


The third story on A-1 today is a superficial look at the wonderful Jersey Shore and a TV reality show of the same name I have never watched. What I want to know is why even modest homes blocks from the beach are selling for more than $1 million, and why that's not in the story?


There is so much news from Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other towns missing from Local today, desperate head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes pulled out all the stops on filler, as her staff apparently were told to start a three-day weekend Friday, a reward for all their hard work.


L-1 carries a story by a business reporter that got lost on the way to publication. L-2 has another Dean's List. The center of L-3 has a photo of a truck-house collision, non-fatal, of course. Gee-whiz, would you look at that. Half of L-5 is taken up by expanded, wire-service obituaries of people we have never heard of. And L-6 has a story from distant Rockaway Township, where The Record and Herald News have been printed since, what, 2007. (Stephen A. Borg ended highly profitable commercial printing at the Rockaway plant and laid off 55 press workers.) Whew.


Also missing is a hit-run accident charged to a prominent Harrington Park landscaper -- that's the burg where Sykes lives -- but it was all over Cliffview Pilot.com on Friday. That town gets even less coverage than Hackensack, if you can imagine that.

Is Sykes trying to protect officials or friends in her town, or is she just lazy? Here, read the story for yourself at the following link:


Harrington Park landscaper arrested

One town gets special treatment

Image by birdphone via Flickr

With the seeming regularity of the seasons, The Record of Woodland Park takes the pulse of Ridgewood's bustling downtown (photo), while virtually ignoring the increasing number of empty storefronts on Hackensack's Main Street after the newspaper moved out of the city where it prospered for more than 110 years.


A new rewards card designed to lure shoppers to Ridgewood is explored in a long story with photos on the front of the Local news section today -- at least the fourth major story about the village's downtown in the last two years. Meanwhile, the decline of news from Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood is apparent again today, and those struggling downtowns haven't been featured in the paper in many years.


Ridgewood has gotten even more special attention, because of a well-organized group of wealthy residents opposed to expansion of The Valley Hospital. In the past two years, those stories have been numerous and repetitive. The paper never made as much fuss over several expansions of Hackensack University Medical Center, some of which required the demolition of homes. In Ridgewood, the hospital is expanding on its own land.


Hackensack's downtown is beginning to slide back to what it was like in 2005, with many empty storefronts and the homeless roaming Main Street. A new county shelter seems to have removed the homeless, but in the last six months, at least three food businesses have closed, and other storefronts remain vacant.

The Ridgewood coverage often took its cue from protesters, although the paper, eager for increased hospital ad revenue, endorsed the expansion plan. But when former Managing Editor Jim Ahearn erred in his column on the proposed height of the new hospital buildings, the corrections ran on A-2 as well as on the opinion pages -- the first time I have ever seen that.


The Record has never reported how its move out of Hackensack, along with parent company North Jersey Media Group, has changed River City, where it was founded in 1895. Hundreds of printers and other employees were scattered to the winds by Publisher Stephen A. Borg, and others were downsized -- apparently motivated by Borg's desire to make a killing on the sale of 150 River Street and nearly 20 acres of surrounding land, a windfall he has been denied so far, leaving his father Mac as a ghostly presence in the building.

Why does Ridgewood get so much attention? Is it the enterprise of Staff Writer Evonne Coutros, who is assigned to the village, compared with other local reporters, who seem to wait for direction from their clueless assignment editors? Or is it the desperate need for local news copy as the staff's overall productivity has plummeted under the coddling of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, who clucks over her reporters like a Mother Hen?

Or is it a conscious decision by the editors and their absentee bosses -- the Borgs -- to cover people like themselves -- a mostly white, upscale audience found in the Ridgewoods of North Jersey and not in the Bergen towns with significant minority populations?

Also in Local, a rare story on people with Alzheimer's disease who wander away appears on L-3. For every Alzheimer's story the youth-oriented editors run, it seems, there are 10 stories on autism. Just another example of what a great job Sykes and Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale are doing. 


Today's front page is solidly New Jersey, and includes a patch story on a poor schmuck from Saddle Brook whose health insurance is so hellish, he has been trapped in a hospital for three years. But the editors must have really been desperate if they led the paper with possible privatization of roadside-service patrols on non-toll highways.

New Jersey and the oil spill -- boring together

Image via Wikipedia

I've been waiting for the story on how New Jersey scientists and residents have responded in the two months since the massive oil spill in the Gulf, so what do the editors at The Record of Woodland Park do? They plaster a long, confusing and, ultimately, boring, piece on mini subs all over Page 1 today.


This story couldn't possibly have been written for A-1. The assignment editor must have fallen asleep while editing it. Even the news copy editor drops the ball on polishing this turd. The headline says,  "Rutgers' mini subs monitor oil spill." Monitor? Watching paint dry is more exciting. An oceanographer is shown "observing" data.


You have to plow through most of it before you find out whether the New Jersey Shore is in danger from the BP spill. That should have been high up in the story. And the reporter never resolves the controversy over whether huge oil plumes exist below the surface, despite all the evidence presented by other scientists that they do.


The lead story on the front page is the murder of another teacher. Unless Governor Christie is a suspect, this doesn't belong on A-1, especially given the Morris County location and the lack of Bergen County news in the paper. 


A better, more relevant story for Page 1 is on A-4 -- the battle over beach access on the Jersey shore. This could have supplanted the mini-sub story, too. That story could have been told by an inside photo and graphic. But news judgment isn't a strong suit among such editors as Frank Scandale, Deirdre Sykes and whoever got stuck working Sunday.

An editorial on A-11 criticizes Christie for proposing huge cuts in legal services for the poor, but in a column on the same page, Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin takes the governor's side in  opposing a millionaires tax. I guess Doblin stlll wants to get his weekly check form the wealthy Borgs.

Doblin presumably also edits and approves editorials, including those about Christie's policies, so isn't his column a conflict? And his column usually is so poorly written and juvenile, no reader would miss it.


Local is pathetic. No Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood news, yet another story on the proposed expansion of The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. The story rehashes the same arguments readers have seen for almost three years. The overly dramatic headline doesn't help.

(Photo: Jersey shore)

More unbelievably boring Page 1 news

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The suicide of a state trooper and a $20 billion BP fund for victims earn only a few paragraphs each on Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park today, but most of the page is devoted to maybe, could-be, wannabe stories the desperate editors are trying to pass off as local news.


Do North Jersey residents really care if the borough of Teterboro is carved up? All this coverage for a trial balloon? What residents are really dying to know is why the newspaper hasn't written anything about the tremendous quality-of-life impact the small airport has on them every day?

Are the Borgs among the fat cats whose behinds are pampered in noisy business jets, as an anonymous commentator has reported? Those planes seem to scrape rooftops in Hackensack, Teaneck, Maywood and other towns, depriving residents of the enjoyment of their back yards and high-rise balconies.

If so, that might explain why editors such as Frank Scandale, Deirdre Sykes and others have avoided the noise story for so many years. Or is former Publisher Malcolm A. Borg's long-time support for an aviation museum at the airport the reason the charter jet companies get so much promotional coverage in Business?


Of course, when you have lazy transportation reporters like Tom Davis and Assignment Editor Dan Sforza, who as a transportation reporter wrote about "highways of the future," you'll never get hard-hitting reporting about the airport or anything else. What you do get is Davis' speculative, A-1 story today on the possible construction of a Hudson River rail tunnel for Amtrak "within 20 years." Twenty years!


Davis, Sforza, Road Warrior John Cichowski and other lazy staffers refuse to look at the quality of the mass transit commuters have to contend with now, such as the creaking, decades-old local buses NJ Transit still uses in Bergen and Passaic counties. It might be that the riders, largely working class blacks and Hispanics who can't afford cars, are easy to ignore for the newspaper's overwhelmingly white newsroom staff.

Eager to deny President Obama a victory, an editorial on A-22 minimizes his Oval Office address, and blames him for not stopping the BP oil leak. As bad as the gushing oil is, it's ridiculous to compare the disaster to World War II, but Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin desperately needs exaggeration to make his point.


With no substantial Hackensack or Teaneck news to work with -- and the speculative Teterboro story all over A-1 --  all the editors have for the Local front today is police and court news. There's not even a word from Monsy Alvarado, the Hackensack reporter, on the proposed city budget and tax hike.


Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano turns out a short piece on the Mackay Park ice rink -- the first story about the city since the end of May. We welcome back this bull dog of news.

In Better Living, it is no-food-news Thursday.

(Photo: President Obama in the White House Oval Office)

More rehashing of the news

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Should we praise the FBI for finally recognizing the threat of homemade bombs nearly a decade after 9/11, as The Record of Woodland Park does today by putting the story on Page 1? And who else brings us the news but Columnist Mike Kelly, chief rehasher at the former Hackensack daily.


If you want background on a big story, Kelly is the guy to go to. His column today is filled with lots of old news, but not much perspective on the failure of homeland security officials -- until now -- to recognize a threat that Israel and the rest of the world has known for decades -- the crowd-murdering, almost impossible to stop suicide bomber. Lucky for us -- and for homeland security officials -- the suspect in the attempted Time Square bombing was such a klutz.


The last time I saw Kelly, outside the paper's old headquarters in Hackensack, I told him the updated photo that runs with his column is unflattering. Is that a smile or a smirk? Is that his sport or suit jacket thrown casually over his shoulder? Is he trying to strike the pose of a model journalist or just a model?


Is he saying, Stick with me for the latest insight on the news, or Stick with me while I push words around and never go out on a limb with strong opinions columnists are supposed to express? It's the latter, of course.


The Local section is devoid of any news from Hackensack or Englewood, but Road Warrior John Cichowski has yet another column on teen driving decals and actually quotes adults who fear the decals will help sexual predators find their victims. I was a reporter and news copy editor at The Record for nearly three decades and worked on numerous stories about teen sex victims -- no one needed a decal to find a teen in those days, and no one needs one now.


In Better Living, Food Editor Bill Pitcher says you pay for quality -- not quantity -- at Rocca in Glen Rock, but never backs that up with any information about the provenance of the food, so readers can make an informed decision. (Pitcher and the other restaurant reviewer, Elisa Ung, who is on leave, have the word "quality" on a save/get key and throw it around with abandon, usually with no basis in fact.)


For example, a Rocca entree of four scallops for $31 seems high, as he suggests, but if they are from a day boat, they would be the freshest you could find and free of preservatives, and might be worth the price. Surely, the $70,000-plus food editor has heard of day-boat scallops?


He's not the only overpaid editor at The Record -- there's Frank Scandale, Deirdre Sykes, Frank Burgos, pals Barbara Jaeger and Liz Houlton, and on and on. The paper is top heavy with editors who attend a lot of meetings, but who have failed to stop its slide into mediocrity.



Today, hype is king -- as in Publisher Stephen A. Borg's "The Trusted Local Source" and North Jersey Media Group's "responsible journalism."

Sadly, the joke is on readers.

The weird front page returns

Image by Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake via Flickr

 











A week or more of natural and unnatural events drove The Record of Woodland Park to publish a series of hard-news front pages. Today, the lazy, incompetent editors commit such poor news judgment on Page 1 and elsewhere, it's clearly a return to journalism as usual.


What's with the lead A-1 story by Staff Writer John Brennan? He gets Governor Christie in front of the paper's "editorial board," but doesn't even ask him if the return of the so-called millionaire's tax on Christie's rich friends could generate enough revenue to prevent a battle over Bergen County blue laws, or why he doesn't agree to even a modest hike in the low gasoline tax.

Then, what's this story with the photo? The Navy is bringing back an airship program? Why is this on A-1?  What about the judge who rejected the deal to compensate 9/11 workers? Isn't that worth more than a few paragraphs outside?


On A-11 -- the editorial page -- why does it take a letter from reader Chuck Bailey, a former Closter resident, to expose Republicans' desperation and lies in the battle over passing health care reform? Isn't it the job of the media, including The Record, to sort out fact from fiction? But it's clear the former Hackensack daily's editors and owners are interested only in selling newspapers.

In Local  today, Teaneck reporter Joseph Ax has two education stories, but Deirdre Sykes and the other desperate editors resort to using the Dean's List again to flesh out "every day" coverage, ignoring schools in Hackensack, Englewood and many other Bergen County towns.

The L-6 story on an age-bias lawsuit by a Washington Township police sergeant speaks volumes about the folly of home rule and the buffoonish officials who run our lives and set our property taxes. The mayor apparently admitted to a "local newspaper reporter" he wanted to promote younger officers to "stabilize the long-term succession of leadership in the department."

Finally, why did the editors bury on L-7 an update about the Teaneck mom who saved her home from foreclosure by baking cakes? Like the original, no other paper had this success story from one of the core towns in Bergen County (photo: Zoe's Cupcake Cafe).

This will come back to haunt us

The inconsistent news treatment of the state's growing budget deficit in The Record of Woodland Park will haunt taxpayers in 2010, because editors desperate for more sensational coverage likely don't have readers' best interests at heart.

The lead headline in the former Hackensack daily today says, "More budget cuts on way" -- the first time in a while state finances have made the front page. The deepening deficit was apparent right after Chris Christie was elected in early November, but the story has jumped onto and off of Page 1 since then, usually displaced by crime news, pathos and endless stories about the new Meadowlands sports stadium.

Today, a good third of A-1 and two-thirds of an inside page are devoted to a 1973 murder case and the spot in a New York State park where the body of a 7-year-old girl was found. Earlier this year, there were a series of stories about the convicted murderer's latest parole bid. Isn't there any other "news" worthy of Page 1 today? Couldn't this story have been done with a single photograph inside the Local section? What's the point of revisiting this case?

The rest of A-1 is given to Paterson offering free gun locks to avoid a repeat of the slaying of a 5-year-old boy by a 6-year-old who found an illegal handgun in his home.

In the Local section, finally, there is a Hackensack story for a change by Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado, who now apparently  is free of  the nearly three-year, failed investigation of moonlighting by Michael Mordaga, the former chief of county detectives. It seems the city is buying a building for a new arts center. Hooray. Desperate for local news, an Englewood chimney fire that didn't cause any injuries gets big play. Don't the lazy, incompetent assignment editors know readers can see right through this?

Maybe John Cichowski is burnt out by having to write three columns a week, plus covering transportation news on occasion. What else can you conclude from his Road Warrior column today, chastising readers yet again over clearing snow from the roofs of their vehicles. John, you are a nice guy and journalist, but please get out of that Garret Mountain newsroom you have made your second home and ride some trains and buses to familiarize yourself with the woes of commuters who leave their cars at home, if they even own one.

I winced at the headline on Page F-3 in Better Living over a story about three veteran French chefs in Bergen County. I'm sure these accomplished seniors, who are in their 60s, love being called a "dying breed."