No news today, but here are a few second looks

Repairs to the parking lot, roadway and sidewalk of the Alfred N. Sanzari Medical Arts Building on Essex Street in Hackensack seemed to drag on for months, and made visiting Starbucks Coffee a challenge. When I stopped there on Friday, the work had finally been completed.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Some days you have to question why the media spends more time trying to predict the future than they do on reporting what has happened.

In the crystal-ball category, you can put all the speculation in the past few years about who is going to be the standard bearer for the do-nothing Republicans in the 2016 presidential race.

Today, on Page 1 of The Record, Herb Jackson's NJ/DC column on the fate of a new Hudson River rail tunnel also falls into the former, "no news today" category.

But you have to believe the clueless columnist has never fought the horrendous traffic into New York when his lead paragraph mentions the tunnel in the same breath as projects denounced "as wasteful pork" (A-1).

That's in keeping with the policy of The Record's transportation reporters to ignore how difficult it has been in recent years to find a seat on a rush-hour train.

Home rule

Since Jan. 1, the Local section has been filled with swearing in stories and photos, but today, the editors ran an especially unflattering photo of Jayme Ouellette, who was bending to place her hand on a Bible held by her step-grandson (L-3).

Either the new Rochelle Park mayor is pregnant or she is overweight, but readers are left to speculate.

Amateur hour

All of the swearing in stories have run without comment from the editorial writers, who should at least ask residents to hope that the latest amateur elected to run their town will do a better job than the previous one.

In wealthy Tenafly, the editors haven't attempted to explain why residents rejected two proposals that would have had big environmental benefits, an expanded nature center and extension of NJ Transit's light-rail system to the town's center.

Or why town officials didn't override those narrow-minded residents.

A story on the Tenafly reorganization ran on Sunday's L-3.

Nazerah Bugg

Stories on tributes to Nazerah Bugg, 14, the aspiring Paterson basketball player who was killed by random gunfire in September, haven't reported whether police are doing a better job of protecting Silk City residents from gun violence (L-1 on Sunday).

In fact, the image of the police The Record has promoted in recent years is heroic, and the editors have failed to question the job they are doing -- whether it's stopping the murder of innocent young girls in Paterson or burglaries in Tenafly.

This policy has backfired, as shown by all of the woefully incomplete stories The Record runs on pedestrian deaths, murders and other news the police and prosecutors refuse to discuss with reporters.