Readers shut out again by bear news

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The Record of Woodland Park's system for covering news is in full view on the front page today, with a story on complaints against NJ Transit bus drivers. That story by Staff Writer Karen Rouse shares A-1 with two other stories, including more follows on the parking-garage collapse in Hackensack.



If you read Rouse's story, it's pretty clear the transportation reporter didn't actually ride any buses to observe the service first-hand. Instead, she followed The Record system, using complaints provided to her by the transit agency. A neat package of information. No fuss, no muss, and no need to actually leave the office.

This is the kind of quick-and-superficial journalism encouraged by Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, aided and abetted by Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who appears to be no longer involved in editorial decisions -- in contrast to the two years or so he spent in the Hackensack newsroom after he took over in mid-2006, when he effectively castrated Scandale.

Nowhere in today's story will you find the experiences of local bus riders -- many of them minorities who can't afford cars -- with a fleet of creaking, decades-old buses, such as the No. 780 between Englewood and Passaic. Rouse has been aware of these decrepit buses since 2007, but has never written about them.

And apparently because she never rides any NJ Transit buses, she publishes two complaints that are much less serious than they seem. 

On the front, a member of U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg's staff complained that a bus driver pulled out in front of him without looking. The staff member -- and Rouse -- apparently are ignorant of a law that drivers must yield when buses are pulling out into traffic (a triangular yield message is on the rear left of every NJ Transit bus). Of course, that doesn't excuse the bus operator for displaying his finger and cursing.


Inside, she quotes a complaint that a driver was going so fast, the brakes made a "high-pitch whining sound" and were "screaming in pain." Rouse apparently is unaware hundreds of NJ Transit cruiser buses proved to have defective rear brakes that screeched with every stop -- a story Assignment Editor Dan Sforza was too lazy to do when he was transportation reporter.

Finally, what about the idiotic main headline? Instead of listing top complaints, the news copy editor or his supervisor must have been bribed by the transit agency to write such a self-serving message that drivers "put customers first." That completely dilutes the impact of the story.


In view of all the Paterson news the paper has published since it moved to Woodland Park -- Silk City gets better coverage than Hackensack -- it's a puzzle why the editors didn't use the slaying of a 29-year-old Navy veteran on A-1. That story belongs on the front more than the one promoting Lautenberg's bid for more federal aid for the state.


It's likely the desperate editors had to relegate the slaying story to Local, because there was so little local news, abundantly clear from the three expanded obituaries of people you never heard of on Page L-5. There is no Hackensack, Englewood or Teaneck news in the section today, but another in a random series of stories on bears and bear hunts leads L-1.


I guess there weren't enough reporters working Sunday for a weather story as the latest heat wave enters its fourth day of oppressive temperatures and humidity.


Saturday, July 3, 2010




This paper, the last of those delivered while I was away, has a Page 1 story on a Borough Hall from Hell in Woodcliff Lake, and stories about Teaneck and Englewood in Local, but nothing about Hackensack, where a new mayor was sworn in two days earlier.