Image by Getty Images via @daylifeToday's front page is about as soft as you can get, except for the photos at the bottom of the page on cleanup of the magnificent Great Falls in Paterson, one of the most neglected natural attractions in the Northeast. As far as The Record of Woodland Park is concerned, life stood still.
Maybe the recent lack of sunshine has affected the editors, including Frank "Castrato" Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes.
Do the editors talk with one another? Is Page 1 play planned or just done haphazardly by Scandale while he sits on a toilet in the men's room? The main element on A-1 today and a column on the OpEd page both go over essentially the same ground on the controversial medical marijuana law.
In the Page 1 story, the reporter seems bored with her subject, quoting one bureaucratic delay after another. Couldn't she find anyone to express outrage over the denial of relief to the terminally ill, including the poor man with the face tumors in the big photo? "We're working diligently," a state Health Department spokeswoman is quoted as saying. Give me a break.
Former Managing Editor Jim Ahearn's column (A-9) is more focused, pinning some of the delay on Governor Christie, who did a major about-face on medical marijuana.
The lead story on A-1 finally gets around to reporting new regulations to keep emergency responders safe on state highways that went into effect in June. I guess the staff was on vacation then.
In Local, Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado covers a school board meeting for the first time in more than a year (L-1), and it is cut short by a disruptive former employee.
There is no other Hackensack news, or anything from Englewood or Teaneck, but there is a follow-up story on partisan politics in Englewood Cliffs, where one council Democrat resigned abruptly and another said he wouldn't run for election. The second Democrat has changed his mind.
The original Cliffs story -- in which one council member stormed out during an argument with another -- and today's lead L-1 story on voters backing Ridgefield's indicted mayor belong on the front page, in place of some of the nonsense Scandale loves. The Cliffs story reflects so well what is happening nationally, and deserves better play.
The process stories, such as the one on medical marijuana, don't really grab readers. Ahearn's column would have been enough.
I wonder why The Record didn't report an Appellate Division ruling in a dispute between two lawyers over hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in a case that was covered extensively by the paper? One of the lawyers is a good source for Kibret Markos, the Bergen County Courthouse reporter.
According to Cliffview Pilot.com, which reported last week's ruling on Monday, lawyer Rosemary Arnold of Fort Lee has been fighting with fellow attorney David Mazie, who took over a DWI case, brought it to trial, and won what originally was a $105 million verdict that later was pared to $25 million for young Antonia Verni’s Cliffside Park family.
For his trouble, Mazie got more than $4.6 million, while Arnold collected only $227,500 -- even though Mazie argued that she should have gotten nothing. Arnold went in demanding half. In a published interview, Mazie said Arnold did little on the case when he was finally brought in.
But the appeals court said the lower court judge erred in 2008 by not explaining why he cut Arnold's request so drastically, and sent back the legal-fees dispute to be heard by another judge.
Cliffview Pilot.com reported that when Arnold realized the drunk driver, Daniel Lanzaro, had only $100,000 in insurance, she brought in other defendants, including the New York Giants, National Football League, New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority and Giants Stadium, where Lanzaro had a staggering amount of beer during a game, as well as Aramark Corp., the stadium vendor that served him before he smashed head-on into the Vernis' vehicle in Hasbrouck Heights in 1999.
Have you noticed subtle typographical changes that allow more vertical room on some pages? The change is most noticeable on the editorial page, where the names of managers and editors now appear below the editorials. On the fronts, the changes seem to accommodate ads that run along the bottom of the pages.
the link to that story would be: http://www.cliffviewpilot.com/bergen/1576-bergen-lawyer-stiffed-in-case-involving-girl-paralyzed-by-drunk-giants-fan-panel-rules
ReplyDeletethank you, victor.
Ahern is a perfect illustration of the difference between old Record and current Record. There's no kind way to say this--the intellect is way down, starting at the top. While Scandale is not moron, he has a perfunctory education, is not well-read and basically lacks intellectual curiousity. That might be fine in some other markets, but not in most of Bergen, where the audience is largely more worldly than the people who edit the paper. Those residents not only dislike being talked down to, they find it laughable to be treated like retards by someone who is clearly less educated than they are.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jerry.
ReplyDeleteI agree. And others have said Publisher Stephen Borg is pretty much a dim light bulb.
ReplyDeletePlease, don't insult light bulbs. Stephen probably showed some potential as a kid, but I suspect his brain has been fried by microwaves from the cellphone glued to his ear.
ReplyDeleteThat's for sure. He always had the phone to his ear on the way out of the Hackensack newsroom so he wouldn't have to say hello to the peons. Despite all the messages I sent him in 2006-08 about age discrimination and the poor job the editors were doing in covering local news, he didn't know who I was until we were sitting across the table at his deposition in Woodland Park. Then, he said, "I couldn't pick him out of a lineup until today." Lineup? Give me a break.
ReplyDelete