We'll tell you about it when we want to

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On Page 1 or in the Local section, stories are reported days, weeks, even months after they happened. Editors and reporters at The Record of Woodland Park give the impression they don't want to rush around handling breaking news, lest their workload become too onerous. Are readers less informed? The editors say, We don't care.


Today, A-1 brings us a lot of soft news, but the most important story to homeowners in North Jersey is skimpy on details. 

The main story reports bounty hunters have to carry licenses. The first ones were issued "several months ago."  Why take up all this space for a story of interest to only a few of us? Is this the work of Editor Frank "Castrato" Scandale?


In the story about towns heading off tax appeals by reassessing homes, officials say the new home values -- adjusted to current market value -- would be "fairer" to taxpayers, but doesn't go on to say whether that means tax bills will be lower, too. No examples are cited from towns that have already reassessed -- home value and tax bill before, home value and tax bill after. Why skimp on this story, and cover the bounty hunters so lavishly?

If you doubt, Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin has rolled over and played dead amid all of Governor Christie's budget cutting -- which has targeted women, schoolchildren, seniors and other middle- and working-class residents -- read the limp editorial on A-10 today. Here's the last sentence:

"We can only hope -- and keep close watch over our elected officials, and pressure them to retool these reforms if the costs are too dear and the benefits too little."

Hope? Too dear? Where is the newspaper's outrage, its thunder? It's not enough to have a hard-hitting cartoonist like Margulies, who today blasts Christie for "gambling with women's health."  You can just see Doblin sipping tea and eating small, crust-less sandwiches while he composed or edited this pathetically weak editorial, which makes no mention of huge tax breaks for the Borgs and other millionaires.


Charles Saydah, editor of letters to the editor, is a member of Doblin's staff who at first glance has one of the cushiest jobs at the newspaper. If he has other duties, I am unaware of them.

When the "lifer" worked in Hackensack, he always had time for a midday jog over the bridge to Bogota. (He ran in the street, not on the sidewalk, and I almost ran him down one day near the Afghan restaurant in Teaneck.)

I don't know how Saydah avoided joining the exodus of workers over 50 that Publisher Stephen A. Borg set into motion when he took over in mid-2006. Saydah used to work in an office at the rear of the newsroom, and maybe Borg didn't know he existed. 

After I left The Record in May 2008, I sent in at least one letter noting the decline of local news, but Saydah ignored me.  
 

Maybe the letter editor is doing a really great job, but you'd have to question that after reading a letter published Tuesday on A-8 from Gail C. Dever, a Bergenfield woman who tried a number of roads but couldn't find the entrance to the new Overpeck Park. 

You'd think Saydah would have looked up the stories on the opening of the park and written an editor's note with the answer, but the letter ran without comment.

In Local, Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado finally gets around to reporting school board appointments made at meetings in June and July, and the need for re-votes. This is the third school board story or brief Alvarado has written since July 30, but she has gone 11 months without writing about the city's schools. 


Maybe head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes has told her poor baby chick not to overwork herself, and see if she can go a year or 13 months without writing about the schools.


On L-3, another big story on "American Idol" auditions in the Meadowlands fills space that could carry Englewood or Teaneck news, but there is none today. 

On L-6, space was especially tight after cramming in a huge photo of a man at a lectern AND an 18-inch story and photo on the stabbing of a Manchester Regional High football player in Clifton. Layout editors had to omit the "Brief Tributes"heading over two expanded obituaries at the top of the page.