Wait until next year

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Continuing its apparent boycott on news of Hackensack and many other important Bergen County towns, The Record of Woodland Park may be telling us to wait until next year. I guess the lazy, incompetent editors didn't make a New Year's resolution to do a better job of covering local news.

For the third day in a row, most of the front page today is devoted to the Jets football team and airhead reporter John Brennan, who squanders his trip to Indianapolis by turning in some of the most lackluster copy I've ever seen. The bottom of the front page goes to the poor schmucks who live in polluted Pompton Lakes (map), where DuPont, and town and state officials have been screwing around for more than 20 years on cleaning up groundwater contamination. Isn't home rule a great system?

You'll find lots of "filler" stories today, the kind the desperate editors have to run in the absence of real news, like the story on A-4 about three-wheel motorcycles in Los Angeles. The crisis in Haiti stays inside today, but do readers really need three stories on North Jersey doctors, a pastor and a nurse who went there?

There is good news for consumers in the Business pages, for a change, word that Governor Corzine signed a law before he left office allowing sellers' real estate agents to give rebates to buyers. I'm still waiting for a story on real estate agents who represent buyers and get paid by sellers.

Have you ever heard of anyone being jailed for not going to a deposition -- confidential testimony given under oath in a civil lawsuit before a trial? Of course not, but in a Page 1 promo and in the Local section, reporter Ashley Kindergan quotes a plaintiff saying he wants the Bergenfield mayor jailed. This is a non-story.

You have to wonder why head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes and the editor who supervise Kindergan, one of the best reporters on the local news staff, pushed this turkey for the front of the section. And what do you make of Columnist Jersey Mike Kelly's latest, pathetic effort?

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 Yes. Hackensack residents feel good about next year.