Missing the year's biggest story

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Can you believe The Record of Woodland Park missed Monday's best story -- passage of a mean-spirited state budget pushed through the Legislature by our steamroller of a governor? What's all this Cold War-era nonsense about spies who live "next door." In Montclair? The majority of readers live in Bergen County, and we're sick and tired of the lazy editors settling for the sensational over the substantial.

Was the spy headline supposed to make me shake in my bathrobe? I know my neighbors, and they're hard-working middle class families who resent the lack of Hackensack news day after day.


So few of the reporters under head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes do anything, it's a colossal misjudgment to assign four of them to this stupid spy story, then give it bigger play on Page 1 today than the budget story, and for what reason?

Was it early deadlines, which sacrifice getting late, breaking news into the paper to accommodate the dysfunctional home-delivery system? Did Sykes and Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale want to go home rather than get the year's biggest story into the paper? Or was it simply more incompetence?

Governor Christie's budget represents the biggest assault on the middle and working classes, the elderly and the poor in New Jersey history, while benefiting small-business owners and such fat cats as the Borgs. 

Charles Stile's column has run on the front before. Why not today, when he describes the once-moderate state Republican Party's nasty turn? In fact, all of the elements on A-6 should have been on A-1 today. The inconsequential spy story actually gets more space than this historically flawed budget and its impact on our way of life. Even Alfred P. Doblin, the editorial page editor, took the evening off, leaving behind two lame editorials.


On A-10, a letter to the editor savages Doblin for his June 25 column with the headline, "Springtime for Gordon, winter for Teterboro." The buffoonish Doblin, it seems, invoked a comedic song about Hitler to criticize Sen. Robert Gordon, the Fair Lawn Democrat who happens to be Jewish, for sponsoring the proposal to break up Teterboro.

Doblin's juvenile style reminds me of that other jerk on the staff, Bill Ervolino, whose northjersey.com blog was shut down in March after inappropriate references to Malia Obama, then 12, one of the president's daughter. When are the Borgs and Scandale going to dump the offensive Ervolino and clownish Doblin?

The lead story on the Local front has the headline, "Chase ends in crash," that the news copy  editors keep on a save-get key. There is more police news in the section, including Giovanna Fabiano's contribution from Englewood, but no municipal news from that city, Hackensack or Teaneck. 


Should we wait for Fabiano's takeout on the Hispanic community in Englewood -- both legal and illegal -- and how it has added a new dimension to the city? Nah. She's too lazy to tackle enterprise, and her assignment editor is clueless. She spends so little time in Englewood, people are always asking to see her press pass.


But I really shouldn't single her out for criticism when Staff Writer Jean Rimbach trades on her friendship with "Mother Hen" Sykes to write an average of one story a year. When is the last time Shawn Boburg wrote a story? Or Monsy Alvarado?

The reporting staff was basically untouched by the downsizing that started in 2008, so it's likely there are still about 50 reporters or specialty writers in the newsroom. If you see only eight bylines in the paper, what does that mean? What are the others doing to justify their existence?

(Map: Teterboro)