Looking strangely like a tabloid

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Governor Christie is seriously weighing a horse race pitting GOP presidential hopefuls against each other around the Monmouth Park track.

Interim Editor Doug Clancy is big on crime news, leading The Record's front page three days in a row with the fatal police shooting of a Garfield suspect or the murder of a Wood-Ridge man, allegedly by an ex-cop.


Gee whiz. If an ex-cop is committing crime, are any of us safe? 


Clancy doesn't seem to have much else for Page 1.


Horse manure 


He's given Staff Writer John Brennan precious A-1 space to report Governor Christie is threatening to close Monmouth Park and The Meadowlands horse-racing tracks unless they are privatized real soon.


Does anyone care about this so-called crisis besides Brennan, a horse's ass, and a small minority of readers?


A photo at the bottom of A-1 shows two elitist horse's asses -- Christie and Republican hopeful Mitt Romney (A-6 story and A-12 cartoon). 


Why is who the GOP bully supports in the 2012 presidential race front-page news?


Sheriff Sykes


Three of the five stories on the front of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section are police or crime news.


The questionable police shooting of a 19-year-old black man "armed ... with tools" gets demoted to L-1 today from A-1 on Monday.


The biggest -- and only -- Hackensack news today is a photo and story on injuries to a 67-year-old man whose house was destroyed by fire (L-3).


On L-7, the first Business page, a story reports a car dealer's realty company has purchased Nisi Estiatorio, an upscale Greek fish house that has been praised by critics.


Less than a third of an acre went for $4 million. That's just what many residents lining already noisy Grand Avenue really need: another car dealer. 


Ban this word


The word "tasked" in the third paragraph of sports marketer Jim Bukata's obituary stopped me dead in my tracks (L-6).


The bureaucratic buzzword has been creeping into The Record recently and even appeared in an L-1 headline. 


Fie on "tasked." It offends the ear, and should be forever banned.


And to think the latest usage was by local obituary writer Jay Levin, normally a wordsmith and one of the paper's top reporters.

Related post

• Fat bastard takes on President Obama (eyeontherecord.blogspot.com)

Journalism jock itch rules again

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Even when the Yankees lose, Editor Francis Scandale just can't stop the itching from his jock strap and resist the need to slap the other male editors' asses in the news meeting, where he undoubtedly ordered the layout drones to cover most of the front page today with a photo and caption about those turkeys.

The other stories on Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park are more federal fine-tuning on the cost of the Hudson River tunnel Governor Christie dislikes so much, a story about charter school teachers who have joined a union and another on third-party candidates. 

How boring can you get? A-1 seems to alternate between gory, tabloid news and process stories that put readers to sleep. 

In Local, Hackensdack reporter Monsy Alvarado has the second story in three days on the possible rezoning of the struggling Main Street shopping district -- after she ignored public forums on the proposals held in the past couple of months.


Today's story reports the City Council on Thursday night hired a planner and an attorney "to help revamp zoning regulations along Main Street." Why is this buried on L-3?


Gee, I'm surprised the city doesn't already have enough planners and attorneys to do the job in-house. Alvarado reports Douglas Doyle of the DeCotiss Fitzpatrick & Cole law firm will be paid $125 an hour. The hourly rate for Planner Francis Reiner isn't given.

The reporter doesn't quote one of the city's many gadflies on the need to hire them.


City taxpayers should be concerned because the Main Street Business Alliance hired Street-Works LLC of New York to work up a detailed proposal for rezoning Main Street, with specific suggestions on what kind of developers could be invited to remake downtown, including a return to two-way traffic.


Is the planner and attorney hired by the council just going to duplicate that work?

See previous post on the first anniversary
of Eye on The Record