Bad start to a new year

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr

The first day of the new year doesn't bode well for readers of  The Record of Woodland Park, which continues to downplay the worsening obesity epidemic and ignore local news.

The lazy, incompetent editors have stubbornly refused to launch a North Jersey obesity project, which could improve the health of readers. But they had no trouble squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries and nearly three years on the recently concluded vendetta against Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. (See post of Dec. 16, 2009.)

On Page A-15 today, The Record prints its "editorial credo," as it does every year. Don't read this too closely or it might resemble a fairy tale.

For example, I wonder how readers in Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, and all the other towns that get spotty news coverage feel about this sentence in the credo: "Our function is to serve the public interest...." And in reading the credo year after year when I worked there, I always worried that the editorial and opinion staff  worked "under the editor, with occasional suggestions and guidance from the editor/vice president, president and chairman of the board (Stephen A. Borg and his father, Malcolm A. Borg, respectively, neither of whom are journalists).

Stephen Borg, a marketing guru who also is publisher of The Record and Herald News, always seems intent on stretching the truth, as in his choice of  "The Trusted Local Source" to replace "Friend of The People It Serves" under the masthead on Page 1. He also promised food and education coverage "every day," but the editors have failed to deliver. And, of course, the biggest joke he played on employees when he took over was declaring, "I'm not in this for the money," then trading up to a $3.65 million estate with a mortgage from his family's North Jersey Media Group. Cutbacks at the daily papers soon followed, including the move of virtually all of the editors and reporters out of a landmark building in Hackensack, the Bergen County seat.

About the only good thing you can say about the younger Borg is that he repudiated many of the news coverage policies of Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale and called for the appointment of an obituary writer to give an eloquent farewell to notable and intriguing North Jerseyans (after years of increasingly spare coverage of locals who died). The work of veteran Staff Writer Jay Levin, a former colleague of mine on the news copy desk, has often been the highlight of the Local section. Today, Levin does a round-up of those who died in 2009.

The first restaurant review of the new year is written by Bill Pitcher, the so-called food editor, replacing Elisa Ung, who is on leave until summer, according to a note at the end of the column in Better Living. Unfortunately, Ung's two-star review of Bahama Breeze, a fake-Caribbean chain restaurant that opened this year on the highway in Wayne, will haunt Pitcher, who gives only two and a half stars to Bistro 55 in Rochelle Park, even though the chef makes an effort to serve naturally raised food.

And in view of the obesity epidemic, isn't it time for Pitcher to break the mold of how restaurants are reviewed and substitute a salad or a cheese-and-fruit course for all those gooey, artery-clogging desserts he and Ung devour and obsess over? He sampled four of them for this review alone.