Thursday, August 4, 2016

If important story is incorrect, what else did staff get wrong?

The main entrance to the Hackensack Performing Arts Center at 102 State St. clearly shows its origins as a Masonic Temple, above and below.



By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

If you don't live in Hackensack, you probably didn't pay much attention to the A-2 correction in The Record today.

On Wednesday, Editor Deirdre Sykes ran a story in Local, reporting a special meeting of the Hackensack City Council "to introduce nearly $3 million in funding for renovations" to the Performing Arts Center on State Street.

Coincidentally, city taxpayers are scrambling this week to come up with their quarterly tax payments, which are due next Wednesday.

But the story turned out to be wrong, according to today's correction, which said nearly $2.2 million -- not nearly $3 million -- is need for renovations of the former Masonic Temple.

And today's meeting was a no-go, because city officials fell two hours short of the necessary 48-hour notice, and will be held next week.

Hackensack readers can only speculate what else the staff got wrong, given the reputation of six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton to shrug off errors and to publish corrections only reluctantly.

Not much else

Burned-out political Columnist Charles Stile is a day late with his endless ruminations over Governor Christie's image now that the GOP bully was abandoned by his former top aide, Maria Comella.

Still, Sykes is wasting precious front-page space to lead the paper with his boring column (A-1).

Comella spoke to CNN on Tuesday, calling wacko GOP nominee Donald J. Trump a "demagogue" and saying she will vote for Hillary Clinton, so her comments were broadcast and published nationwide on Wednesday.

Residents of North Jersey who fear Trump will be elected president on Nov. 8 will find their dollars go a lot further in Canada: Take refuge from Trump insanity

A big gamble

Also on A-1 today is a story on the closing of the Trump Taj Mahal casino hotel in Atlantic City and the loss of 3,000 jobs after the Labor Day weekend.

That's expected to help put a nail in the coffin of efforts to build casinos in North Jersey, despite the upbeat story on L-3 today.

'Ringwood travesty'

At the bottom of Page 1 today, Staff Writer Scott Fallon reports Ringwood officials still are treating the Ramapoughs like dirt (A-1).

An editorial with the headline "Ringwood travesty" urges the Borough Council to allow a November ballot referendum on removing rather than capping 166,000 tons of pollutants linked to Ford Motor Co. dumping that dates to the 1960s (A-8).

Early Wednesday, the council challenged the referendum on legal grounds in yet another blow to the mixed-race neighborhood of Upper Ringwood.

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