Belated recognition of the victims

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Why is the story on victims of the recession pushed down to the bottom of Page 1 in The Record today, while two stories with the excitement of paint drying lead the Woodland Park daily? College degrees taking longer? Boring. Update on the stalled Xanadu project. Still in talks. How tedious.

Don't go looking for local news from the core Bergen towns of Teaneck, Englewood and Hackensack -- unless you want to read Columnist Mike Kelly's pathetic effort on a family of three displaced by the Prospect Avenue parking-garage collapse July 16. It apparently took him a couple of weeks to find the Gigantes and chronicle their "ordeal," but this drivel wasn't worth waiting for.


It's no surprise that, with all the unemployment and foreclosures, more people are calling hospitals, clinics and suicide hot lines (A-1), but why have we read so little about them in The Record? Can you remember more than a few articles in the past two years or so focusing on victims of companies like North Jersey Media Group?

Maybe that's why Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes haven't commissioned more of these stories. Readers might start to speculate about what is behind fundamental changes in their hometown newspaper -- from fewer sections to a precipitous drop in local news to sloppy copy editing. 

The paper has never fully disclosed how many veteran employees NJMG discarded after Publisher Stephen A. Borg snatched a $3.65 million company mortgage to buy an 8,000-square-foot home in Tenafly, replacing his smaller, $2 million mansion, also bought with a company mortgage. (Attorneys representing the company even withheld complete information on who was fired and who was hired in my recent age-discrimination lawsuit.)


Take a look at this Kelly column on L-1. The headline is, "Life's less free after garage collapse."  In fact, it's Kelly who has "collapsed" from the exhaustion of making something from nothing -- a pattern he has exhibited for many years.


He writes endlessly about a woman in a motorized wheelchair who once used Prospect Avenue sidewalks to reach Starbucks in Hackensack for a morning latte, but cannot go for a latte now because she is living in Route 17 hotel.  "Lisa Gigante's ordeal surely ranks among the worst." Really? This is journalism? Kelly never says why her husband can't drive her to a coffee shop.

On L-2, a proposed state police takeover of Palisades Interstate Parkway police was reported more than a month ago on Cliffview Pilot.com. A police brief on the same page -- "Special unit probes gunfire" -- omits the town.