A truly boring newspaper -- from front to back

As a resident of Euclid Avenue in Hackensack, what do I get for the third-quarter property tax payment of $3,765.65 I made today? Mine was the only block of Euclid that wasn't repaved this month. I do thank Police Director Mike Mordaga for a newly invigorated Police Department, but other agencies fall short. The Building Department, in particular, has turned a deaf ear to neighbors' complaints about 177 Euclid Ave. and 311 Euclid Ave., two homes with numerous violations that have been evident for years.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

What is the point of the front-page story on how onetime inner-city deli owner Pedro Quezada is spending the $338 million he won in the lottery?

The multimillionaire moved out of his 2-bedroom walk-up in Passaic? That's Page 1 news?

What readers and former employees of The Record really want to know is how Publisher Stephen A. Borg has spent the many millions he has drained out of North Jersey Media Group, and whether that money could have preserved jobs or improved local news coverage?

If you think the front page is bad, you won't find much else in the paper that reflects life in North Jersey.

Cairo at night?

I read and re-read the hundreds of words on a curfew in Cairo (no, not the city in Illinois), and couldn't find anything on what time it goes into effect (A-6).

The story by The Associated Press also doesn't address how night workers in the sprawling Egyptian city get to their jobs and then home during the curfew.

When is The Record going to do a story about night workers in North Jersey, including the faceless drones who work on the Woodland Park daily's copy desk under the incompetent supervision of Production Editor Liz Houlton, "The Queen of Errors"?

Christie idolatry

Looking for a good laugh?

Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin -- the paper's Chief Bullshit Artist -- can't hide his affection for Governor Christie in an editorial claiming $1 million in federal seed money is "another example of Christie bipartisanship working for the good of New Jersey" (A-10).

Unfortunately, development of "smart-grid" technology for NJ Transit won't add a single rush-hour seat to overcrowded buses and trains.

And thanks to the GOP bully, expansion of the rail and bus systems is a decade away -- despite nightmarish traffic jams at the Hudson River crossings.

More road kill

Staff Writer John Cichowski, aka "The Addled Commuter," wastes another Road Warrior column on Don Quinn, the moron who tried to warn speeders about police radar (L-1).

Cichowski is breathing a sigh of relief that he was able to fool his clueless editors into running another silly column that didn't require him to leave the office and explore real commuting problems.

Still selling out

With the state's economy in such poor shape, you'd think the editors of the Business pages would have lots of localized stories for readers.

But that assumes they aren't lazy good for nothings who run stories promoting the Borg family's friends and business associates.

Today, they filled their pages with a big photo of a Mazda assembly line in Japan (L-8) that refers readers to another big photo and a long, wildly exaggerated story on the same subject on the facing page (L-9).

The claim that Mazda rolls out a vehicle "every 54 seconds" at a  plant in Hofu, Japan, couldn't possibly include the time it takes to stamp fenders and other body parts, and paint them.

Did editors file missing columnist report?

The official schedule of the Hackensack Board of Education continues to list a meeting this past Monday, the first night of Passover, but the board actually met the previous Thursday. The Record didn't cover the meeting, and at least one resident went to the high school on Monday, only to be told no meeting was being held.

Staff Writer John Cichowski has written a Road Warrior column every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday since he took over the beat from the original, Jeff Page, in late 2003.

Two things soon became apparent: Cichowski is no Jeff Page, and a large number of columns by the new writer contained serious errors that were never corrected.

Today, his Wednesday column is missing, a bit strange considering that Cichowski even wrote ahead so his column would appear during vacations.

Did the editors file a missing columnist report or are they hoping Cichowski got lost somewhere between his home and the office?

Cichowski's last column was flawed, according to a concerned reader, who fired off another e-mail to management:

"In his March 24 column, the Road Warrior strikes out with his third misleading and mistaken report this year about the Yellow Dot (Medical Alert) Program legislation that Governor Christie sent back to the Legislature with a conditional veto.

"Road Warrior is still in denial and unable to comprehend the financing that the Legislature clearly planned for in this bill, and also completely misreported it in his Jan. 30 column.

"Road Warrior mistakenly reported the legislation was conditionally vetoed by Christie because there was 'no money' included in the bill, even though he conditionally vetoed it for the exact opposite reason: He didn't want New Jersey to spend state funds needed for this legislation."

Read the complete e-mail on the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

Road Warrior is off his rocker again 


Isn't it rich?

For the third day in a row, today's front page carries lavish coverage of the $338 Powerball prize and the winner, Pedro Quezada, a Dominican who ran a bodega in Passaic city.

Minorities usually don't land on Page 1 unless they've killed somebody, and you can expect that any time now, Editor Marty Gottlieb and the rest of geniuses running the media will forget about Quezada and his impoverished neighborhood.

Fender-bender news

The big local news today is another accident, this one on Route 17 (L-1).

The big Hackensack news is an Easter egg hunt (L-6 photo), though there are full stories from Teaneck (L-2) and Englewood (L-3).

That kind of coverage is no accident, but can be traced to the sheer incompetence of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her lazy deputy, Dan Sforza, who day after day fail to find enough news to fill Local.

Today, they need an overlong wire-service obituary of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anthony Lewis, who no doubt was a pal of Gottlieb's when they were both crusading journalists at The New York Times (L-5).   

Who needs another white male columnist?

An ambulance from Hackensack University Medical Center responded this morning to a home on Summit Avenue, near Spring Valley Avenue. The transfer of the ambulance service to the hospital from the city's Fire Department has proven to be a bad financial deal for Hackensack's property tax payers.

 

  

I blinked twice, but couldn't avoid the reality of seeing Herb Jackson's byline on a Page 1 column in The Record on Monday.

In one foolhardy move, Editor Marty Gottlieb ignored North Jersey's incredible diversity and named another white male to join the paper's four incompetent news and feature columnists -- all white males.

Jackson is the paper's so-called Washington correspondent, but readers recall his weak reporting on a variety of stories -- from Tea Party demonstrations in the capitol to last year's congressional races in North Jersey.

Lame reporting

Before the November election,  Jackson commanded so little respect he tried and failed to get an interview with Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantage, the subject of Monday's NJ/DC column.

Jackson blew it again, as today's A-2 correction of his amateurish reporting demonstrates.

It's bad enough the new column is written by a white male, ignoring all the talented women in the Woodland Park newsroom.

This from a newspaper that once had an African-American, a Hispanic and a woman writing news columns.

More politics? 

But why did Gottlieb think readers needed another column about politics after suffering through years of Charles Stile's incredibly boring Political Stile?

The rest of Monday's paper is all downhill from Jackson's nonsense, including a correction on A-2, a story about long commutes that belongs in the Road Warrior column, not on the Business page; and a Local section with Hackensack news lifted from a weekly paper (L-2).

Monday's Local also had two stories on major road closures (L-2 and L-3), but not a word about the detour at Passaic Street and Rochelle Avenue that caused major problems this afternoon.

What diversity?

You know Gottlieb is having problems appreciating  North Jersey's diversity when the first front-page story he's had about a resident from the Dominican Republic is today's A-1 report about Pedro Quezada of Passaic city, winner of the $338 million Powerball prize. 

Crossing readers again

On Friday, not Sunday, as I wrote earlier, Road Warrior John Cichowski had another column about the three-year-old crosswalk law, but he still is unable to accurately report on just what drivers are supposed to do when they encounter a pedestrian crossing the street.

A reader, concerned about Cichowski's flawed reporting on a range of issues, sent another e-mail to management, referring to the columnist as the "decoy Road Warrior":

"How sad is it that once again the decoy Road Warrior is unable to comprehend or report accurately on pedestrian fatality statistics and N.J. crosswalk statutes in his column of March 22, while also reporting about decoy cops that would be used in Teaneck to try and snare drivers who might be violating these statutes.

"What is most embarrassing is that The Record's management continually allows the decoy Road Warrior to mistakenly misrepresent the crosswalk statutes in a completely different way each time that he has unsuccessfully tried to explain these statutes to his readers in the past 3 years, even though I have repeatedly corrected the Road Warrior about his misinterpretations in various columns.

"It is interesting to note that the Road Warrior's confused reporting and advice about these crosswalk laws has definitely increased confusion about these crosswalk laws among drivers, pedestrians and readers of The Record. Who knows if this increased confusion has led to any of the increases in pedestrian deaths over the past 3 years?"

The full e-mail can be found on the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

Road Warrior crosses readers again