Police news becomes major news

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Putting down the phone and rising from her seat, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes can't contain her glee and tries to jump off the ground as she shouts across the newsroom: "We've got our [Local news section] front, we've got our front!" Though her talent for levitation is well-known, leaving the ground in a jump for joy continues to elude her: Her arms swing up, but nothing else follows.
 

"Tariq got a shot of a geezer on a stretcher after fleeing burglars ran their SUV into some old people's car in Maywood. We'll blow it up and use it on the front," Sykes shrieks as her laughter echoes across the Woodland Park newsroom. "We really didn't have anything else. Aren't we lucky?"

Her luck is the readers' misfortune today. The Record is dominated by police news on the front page, more police news on the Local front and court, cop and crime stories throughout, in Sykes' and Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale's best imitation of a tabloid.

(Cliffview Pilot.com reported Bergen County police were shooting at the burglary suspects during the chase -- an important element of the story missing in The Record.)
 
Sykes, the Mother Hen to the local reporting staff, didn't have any Hackensack news from Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado, who filed a short story on a disgruntled real estate agent who tried to set Weichert offices on fire. She didn't have any Teaneck news from Staff Writer Joseph Ax, either. In fact, she didn't have stories from most of the towns in Bergen County.

Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano, on the other hand, is on a roll. Today, she has two more stories about Englewood (L-1 and L-5). She also had two stories Thursday (one about the Cliffs), and one story Tuesday (previewing an Englewood meeting she would cover for Thursday's paper). 

One of today's stories reports Englewood officials still feel converting an old school into a community center would be too expensive. They said the same thing about another old school a few years ago. Both buildings are in a predominantly black neighborhood. Fabiano, of course, hasn't  asked officials whether their decision would be different if the community center was on the other side of the tracks. Why should she? She's never written about the segregated elementary and middle schools, either.

At least Fabiano reported passage of Englewood's budget and the city's new tax rate -- more than Alvarado did. Hackesnack residents were hit with a tax hike twice that of Englewood's (7% v. 2.9%), but they had to read a weekly paper to find out.


The rest of Local is filled with more cop news, news about cops, a jury verdict, testimony in a blogger's third federal trial and blah, blah, blah. Very informative, as always.

After nearly seven years in the guise of the Road Warrior, Columnist John Cichowski sees his mission as crafting a nice story -- not fighting for mass-transit commuters. He expresses no outrage whatsoever over the three-year-plus delay in completing a footbridge linking light rail to ferry. He doesn't even bother calling a selfish property company for an explanation of why it didn't grant an easement. 

Page 1 today is dominated by the arrest of a baseball player, thanks to Scandale's sports obsession. The Daily News supplied the story, to the relief of The Record's staff, which started the weekend early. 

In Better Living, former Food Editor Bill Pitcher left behind a three-star review of Rosemary & Sage in far-off Riverdale, and the lead paragraph shows how meat-obsessed he is. A caption describes a dish with "organic" salmon, though that word doesn't appear in the review. There are no organic standards for fish; it's either wild or farmed.