Real news on the front page

There is real news for a change on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park -- especially for a Monday paper -- but you have to wonder why the reporters thought it necessary to exaggerate the danger of a rough landing for a United Airlines flight at Newark airport (photo).

The first paragraph says the pilot "delivered horrifying news to 48 souls aboard a jetliner thousands of feet" in the air. Horrifying? Souls? One of thee landing gears didn't extend. But the obvious professionalism of the pilot throws cold water on the reporters' heated prose: "We are going to have an unusual landing." Was there really a "potential for disaster," as Staff Writers Andrew Tangel and Karen Rouse claim?

Image by robonline via Flickr

Columnist Mike Kelly, the former Hackensack daily's resident mouse, shows up on the front of the Local section today with a tortured tale about missing cobblestones in Carlstadt. Kelly, you might recall, wrote a book about a fatal police shooting in Teaneck and went to Iraq to cover New Jersey National Guard troops. Is this the best he can do for a local news column? Cobblestones?

The Record gets excited every time a town buys a couple of hybrid cars, which have been sold commercially for a decade in the U.S. Look how thrifty your town is being in trying to hold the line on taxes, these stories seem to say. Today, the well-illustrated story on the front of the Local section lists 14 towns of the 90 or so in the paper's circulation area, but omits the actual number of hybrids in use. It's probably about 30 hybrid cars in total among thousands of inefficient conventional cars.


A couple of years ago, the Hackensack city manager was quoted in a regional story as saying the city had taken "baby steps" on such alternative energy as hybrid cars and solar panels. The paper's Hackensack reporter never did a follow-up on why the fleet of V-8 powered police cars are not being replaced with more efficient, 6-cylinder vehicles or why the city doesn't put up solar panels on its buildings and schools. In fact, Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado has been doing a great job of completely ignoring Hackensack news, as she does again today. But you'll find a story with three large photos of two deer being rescued from a frozen pond in Ridgefield Park.

With the move of the paper to Woodland Park from Hackensack last year, the city where The Record was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years is being treated like some boring, backwater burg by the wealthy Borg family. The Borgs perpetuate the myth on Page A-2 every day that the paper is still published in Hackensack, leaving former Publisher Malcolm A. 'Mac' Borg behind to preside over a largely empty building at 150 River St. as his spoiled children run North Jersey Media Group from Garret Mountain.