Food editor cooks up a good one

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Cartoonist Jimmy Margulies lampoons the attempt to kill the toll collectors union.

Susan Leigh Sherrill, The Record's food editor, is referring to me as "a disgruntled reader" -- pretty mild when you consider all the names I've been called since I started Eye on The Record.

And all the vicious names I've hurled at the Borgs, the editors and incompetent staffers, including Bill Ervolino, Mike Kelly and John Cichowski.

Sherrill apparently was upset by my reference to her light workload in my April 20 post:

"Life is easy for Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill, whose entire job seems to be publishing a single recipe on Wednesdays (F-1), plus writing a few items for the Second Helpings blog and tweeting her brains out."

On April 22, she tweeted this to her 115 followers:

@susanlsherrill Susan Sherrill

I ask you, is 4-6, maybe a coupla more, tweets a day "tweeting my brains out?" A disgruntled reader seems to think so ...

Today's paper

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' local news staff must have great depth for her to allow Staff Writer Shawn Boburg to do today's Page 1 takeout on Ground Zero reconstruction, the second in five days.

Today's piece on the soaring, inspirational transit hub is a milestone at the Woodland Park daily, marking the the most extensive discussion of mass transit in years. Are cost overruns in a federally funded project really Page 1 news?

And its construction is a milestone at the Port Authority, reversing the agency's historically poor treatment of PATH commuters.

Coddling reporters

In fact, Sykes' local news staff really must be loafing, if the number of bylines in her A- and L-sections are any indication.

On Sunday, there were only eight Record staff bylines in 22 pages; today, there are fewer than that in the A- and L-sections. I would guess the size of the local reporting staff is at least 50. 

What, exactly, are they doing? I guess they don't find Sykes and her assignment minions very inspirational.

One thing they're not doing are the traditional school election boxes, which briefed readers on school board candidates' positions and school budgets. Today, only a listing of budget amounts and candidates' names appear (L-6).

Lying to readers

This is what Publisher Stephen A. Borg must have meant when he promised readers education news "every day."

But what readers have learned is how little Borg, Sykes and Editor Francis Scandale really care about keeping readers informed. And how the staff includes highly productive members and others who can write as much or as little as they want, without consequences.

The Borgs are beefing up security at their homes now that the so-called James Bond burglars have reappeared in North Jersey's wealthiest neighborhoods (A-1).

Didn't Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg and his wife lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in antique jewelry in one of those smash-and-grab jobs years ago?

Today's Margulies' cartoon (A-11) is in poor taste, given the New Jersey Turnpike Authority's drive to destroy the toll collectors union, with no plans to pass on the savings by lowering tolls paid by drivers and truckers.

A rare nod to our senior citizens

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A brain scan of a human with Alzheimer's disease.

Several years after Editor Francis Scandale took over at The Record, readership started falling. His response was to tailor news coverage to 20-year-olds in what turned out to be a failed strategy for attracting new readers.

But his affection for 20- and 30-year-olds continues as he and other editors give the back of their hands to older workers and older readers.

They replaced the food editor with a young, inexperienced man; routinely ignore the challenges facing elderly drivers and run far more stories on autism than on Alzheimer's disease.

So today's lively, Page 1 story on two North Jersey residents who are looking forward to their 100th birthdays comes as a pleasant surprise. 

It's especially poignant having been written by Jay Levin, an accomplished reporter whose local obituaries usually end up on the back pages.

Never a safe city

At the top of A-1, the first chief quoted in the story on police cutbacks is the head of the force in Englewood, where residents and pedestrians aren't safe even when the department is at full strength.

The assignment desk and staff in Woodland Park must have taken a three-day weekend, if a Star-Ledger story on school budgets was needed to plug a hole on A-1 today.

Bathroom idles

Scandale, Sykes and other editors were alarmed their smart phones stored their locations and could reveal how much time they waste in bathrooms (A-1 and A-7), instead of getting out of the office, talking to their neighbors and learning something -- anything -- about North Jersey.

Wrong again

On the Local front, Road Warrior John Cichowski is wrong when he calls the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid an "electric" car.

Readers looking for municipal news in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes's section will find not one, not two, but three stories about historic preservation (L-1 and L-3).

Leaves a bad taste

The reporter who wrote a gushing profile about the Corrado family appears to have never shopped or purchased expired food in one of its North Jersey food stores, where the quality of produce has dropped in recent years. (Business front). 

The flagship Clifton store has been known to cover the use-by date on salad mixes with a price sticker.

The Corner Table Columnist Elisa Ung appears to be tired of leaving the office. At the end of her Sunday column on the Better Living front, she asks readers for tips to help her write two future columns.

What's next? Polling customers and publishing their opinions in her restaurant reviews?

Editors fiddle while New Jersey burns

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Owners of Xanadu hope there is a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Editor Francis Scandale leads The Record today with a front-page story on political bickering between Governor Christie and the most powerful Democrat in the Legislature -- while New Jersey burns (A-1).

Instead of reporting when Xanadu construction will resume or whether a makeover is in the cards, Scandale runs another story on its weird exterior (A-1). Is this the 19th or 20th piece by Staff Writer John Brennan on the same subject?

Rich man's toy

Did anyone bother reading more than the first few paragraphs of Mike Kelly's boring, long-winded column on a wealthy man who wants to blow $10 million on a skating rink for his kids that would be disguised as a house  (A-1)? Now, Kelly has become a rich man's toy.

An OpEd piece by PSE&G defends the safety of solar panels mounted on telephone polls (A-11). It's too bad they weren't designed to fall and knock some sense into drivers of gas-guzzling SUVs.

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Japan v. Korea

On the Better Living front, Bill Ervolino's Jersey Scene column classifies a big, expensive Japanese supermarket in Edgewater as among "the little known, unusual and sometimes weird things in New Jersey."

A Japanese supermarket has operated there for more than two decades -- what's so weird about that?

Unfortunately, his guides at Mitsuwa Marketplace are two men -- one Japanese, one American -- who preside over the store's annual "cutting" of the giant bluefin tuna, a performance many shoppers boycott because the Japanese are driving those huge fish toward extinction.

Ervolino also treats the Japanese with deference, something he didn't do for the Koreans he wrote about when he visited a big Korean supermarket in Ridgefield, as Eye on The Record reported Nov. 1:

"What happens when you turn a clown loose in H Mart in Ridgefield, a large Korean supermarket that has one of the best selections of fresh fish, Asian greens and other produce in North Jersey? 

"See the Better Living front, where Staff Writer Bill Ervolino chooses to buy and eat mystery pork and beef, and in the process makes fun of one of his Korean guides' English and parodies her diet, focusing on live octopus while ignoring all the healthy tofu and vegetables Koreans eat in main and side dishes."

Christie butts heads with state's high court

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Governor Christie to teachers and everyone else: Do what I say or else.

A governor full of hubris, saying he might defy a ruling of the state's highest court, would be front-page news anywhere but at The Record of Woodland Park, where Editor Francis Scandale is famous for news misjudgment going way back to 9/11.

So, readers have to turn to Page A-3 for a Star-Ledger story reporting Governor-cum-Dictator Christie will close hospitals and lay off cops and firefighters, if the Supreme Court orders him to restore more than $1 billion in education funds -- if he even obeys the ruling.

Christie -- at heart, an argumentative lawyer who has The Record and other media in his pocket -- is really pissed that Associate Justice Barry Albin twice mentioned how Christie cut school aid to low-income children, but refused to impose a millionaires tax to raise $1 billion in new revenue.

To Scandale, this brewing constitutional crisis appears to be less far less significant than more of Christie's do-what-I say-or-else tough talk to teachers, a story that leads A-1 today.

News revolution?

When I first looked at Page 1, I thought the news clerks and reporters had seized control of the newsroom and run a story on the rise of the Tea Party and the Republicans' drive to preserve wealth:

How greed movement

shaped North Jersey

Wait a second. That story is about a different kind of "green." I misread the headline. Never mind. The Record's editors still are marching to the drums of the spoiled Borg siblings.

Searching for municipal news in Local, readers find lots of Law & Order news -- courtesy of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her minions.

Sykes needed two gee-whiz but non-fatal accident photos to fill space on L-2 and L-8.

Poor geography lesson

A huge Better Living cover photo of chicken -- presumably pumped up with antibiotics -- whets readers' appetites for Elisa Ung's review of Mekong Grill, a new Vietnamese restaurant in Ridgewood.

Ung reports that for years before Mekong Grill opened, "Bergen-based food lovers" drove to Spring Valley, N.Y., "to get their Vietnamese fix."

But nothing could be farther from the truth: Chef K.T. Tran has been dishing out great Vietnamese food at a take-out stand or restaurants in Cresskill, Fort Lee, Englewood and Tenafly for well over 15 years.

In fact, in a review just three months ago, Ung praised Tran's "precise cooking and fresh Vietnamese flavors" at her newest restaurant, Simply Vietnamese.