One town gets special treatment

Image by birdphone via Flickr

With the seeming regularity of the seasons, The Record of Woodland Park takes the pulse of Ridgewood's bustling downtown (photo), while virtually ignoring the increasing number of empty storefronts on Hackensack's Main Street after the newspaper moved out of the city where it prospered for more than 110 years.


A new rewards card designed to lure shoppers to Ridgewood is explored in a long story with photos on the front of the Local news section today -- at least the fourth major story about the village's downtown in the last two years. Meanwhile, the decline of news from Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood is apparent again today, and those struggling downtowns haven't been featured in the paper in many years.


Ridgewood has gotten even more special attention, because of a well-organized group of wealthy residents opposed to expansion of The Valley Hospital. In the past two years, those stories have been numerous and repetitive. The paper never made as much fuss over several expansions of Hackensack University Medical Center, some of which required the demolition of homes. In Ridgewood, the hospital is expanding on its own land.


Hackensack's downtown is beginning to slide back to what it was like in 2005, with many empty storefronts and the homeless roaming Main Street. A new county shelter seems to have removed the homeless, but in the last six months, at least three food businesses have closed, and other storefronts remain vacant.

The Ridgewood coverage often took its cue from protesters, although the paper, eager for increased hospital ad revenue, endorsed the expansion plan. But when former Managing Editor Jim Ahearn erred in his column on the proposed height of the new hospital buildings, the corrections ran on A-2 as well as on the opinion pages -- the first time I have ever seen that.


The Record has never reported how its move out of Hackensack, along with parent company North Jersey Media Group, has changed River City, where it was founded in 1895. Hundreds of printers and other employees were scattered to the winds by Publisher Stephen A. Borg, and others were downsized -- apparently motivated by Borg's desire to make a killing on the sale of 150 River Street and nearly 20 acres of surrounding land, a windfall he has been denied so far, leaving his father Mac as a ghostly presence in the building.

Why does Ridgewood get so much attention? Is it the enterprise of Staff Writer Evonne Coutros, who is assigned to the village, compared with other local reporters, who seem to wait for direction from their clueless assignment editors? Or is it the desperate need for local news copy as the staff's overall productivity has plummeted under the coddling of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, who clucks over her reporters like a Mother Hen?

Or is it a conscious decision by the editors and their absentee bosses -- the Borgs -- to cover people like themselves -- a mostly white, upscale audience found in the Ridgewoods of North Jersey and not in the Bergen towns with significant minority populations?

Also in Local, a rare story on people with Alzheimer's disease who wander away appears on L-3. For every Alzheimer's story the youth-oriented editors run, it seems, there are 10 stories on autism. Just another example of what a great job Sykes and Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale are doing. 


Today's front page is solidly New Jersey, and includes a patch story on a poor schmuck from Saddle Brook whose health insurance is so hellish, he has been trapped in a hospital for three years. But the editors must have really been desperate if they led the paper with possible privatization of roadside-service patrols on non-toll highways.