What is the editor's excuse now?

Looking at The Record of Woodland Park today, you have to wonder what excuse head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes offered the local news layout editor for the lack of Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood news?

"We have this really great story about a new music school at Montclair State University and three terrific photos you can run as big as you like [in the Local section]," she likely said in the sweet voice she uses in the office. "And for the front, we have an update story about Ford getting ready to remove tainted soil in Ringwood, with a picture of a backhoe, a map and a data box on arsenic, so those two stories will really take up a lot of room."


I don't know if the long-suffering layout editor even asked if there was any Bergen County news besides four court stories about Park Ridge, a Cresskill CEO, the Ridgefield mayor, and  Garfield and Ho-Ho-Kus firms. Sykes could offer only two briefs, one about Bergen school districts, the other about a freeholder candidate from Franklin Lakes. She might have even wiggled out  of the chore of briefing the layout editor and ordered one of her lazy, incompetent minions, Richard Whitby and Dan Sforza, to do so.

But the layout editor probably knew better than to even ask, let alone complain, about the ongoing lack of news from the premier Bergen towns of Englewood, Teaneck or Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The front page today has what you'd expect a day after Governor Christie spent his first full day in office -- stories about the budget deficit and executive orders he signed, and a story about Jon Corzine gifting some of his staffers with appointments to new jobs.


News of the humanitarian crisis in Haiti gets shoved inside to Page A-10 -- a little more than a week after the earthquake -- and Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin continues to ignore the shameful rescue and relief job by the U.S. and other countries. Maybe the fashion plate spent part of the day shopping for a new suit.

There was a time when The Record would have sent a reporter and photographer to Haiti, but that ended after Publisher Stephen A. Borg sucked out $3.65 million from the coffers of North Jersey Media Group to buy an estate in Tenafly. Now, reporters and photographers stay close to their Woodland Park headquarters. I don't know if his big sister, Vice President/General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg, also got a mortgage from NJMG.

I commend a story on A-19 today to Editors Sykes, Whitby, Sforza, Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski -- who leaves the office only to go home -- and to all those young Bergen municipal reporters who "work from home" so often, they no longer know how to get to the towns they are supposed to be covering. The headline: "Sitting too long is dangerous, even deadly."