Where are the people?

Cover of The Talk of the Town

Day after day, the voices of residents are missing from The Record of Woodland Park. The paper is one of the few in recent decades that never adopted a time-tested journalistic form, used by other papers big and small, called "The Talk of the Town."

Sure, you'll see gadflies quoted or residents at a protest or public hearing on a quality-of-life issue that some crummy town has allowed to fester for decades, such as the closed Pompton Lakes munitions plant all over the front page yesterday. But where are the voices of the rest of us?

We read endless stories about infrastructure, such as the road repair "expose" on Page 1 today, while the voices of the poor schmucks who have to ride NJ Transit's decrepit local buses are ignored. A school official quits and it leads the Local section or a renovated borough hall is finished and the story is lavish and illustrated (both on L-1 today). But what are the people in the coffee shop saying?

Look at the three Teaneck stories that ran today and yesterday. A public hearing finally is being held on a synagogue that has held services for about two years. Two years? The other stories, which ran today, are about insurance against lawsuits and a grant to hire firefighters -- more in the mind-numbing stream of bureaucratic coverage.

If every new municipal reporter at The Record did a "Talk of the Town" -- interviewing residents at the Starbucks, supermarket and elsewhere -- they would get an instant education. They'd learn about quality of life issues and something about how well or how poorly their town is being run. It would be useful for these columns to appear at least once a year for each town. Of course, that's a lot harder than strolling over to the fax machine in the Woodland Park newsroom to fetch a press release.

I wonder what residents of Englewood have to say about the nightmarish downtown traffic -- aggravated by police foot-dragging on installing turn lanes at congested intersections. I wonder what the residents who live across the street from an open-air police firing range have to say about hearing gunshots and shotgun blasts as early as 8 a.m.?

A Record reporter named Dena Yellin did a round-up of police firing ranges some time ago, but omitted the Englewood range. This is the kind of "regional" story that has largely replaced coverage of individual towns.

Christina Joseph, who assigned the story to her, sent it along to the news copy desk without noticing the omission, even though Joseph had covered Englewood as a reporter before she was promoted. The anonymous news copy editor apparently knew nothing about  Englewood, so the story ran as is -- another slap in the face to people who live there. Isn't that pathetic? Especially from a paper that once prided itself on local coverage.

If you are going to do a "Talk of the Town," it will require good, old-fashioned legwork. For a reporter, there is no substitute for going and seeing for yourself. Reject the advice of your lazy, incompetent editor to do stories by phone.

I'm sure residents of the high-rises in Hackensack have a lot to say about the business jets screaming overhead on the way to Teterboro Airport. Some are so frightened by how close these fat cats' planes come, they don't use their terraces in good weather. Would a higher approach altitude for these jets give high-rise dwellers and their neighbors relief from the noise? Does Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado care? Does her editor care?  Does The Record care?