Perverts, luring and 'sexy' outfits for women

The Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack is one of the state's busiest, yet readers see relatively few legal stories from The Record's full-time reporter there.

When you look at three of today's section fronts, you have to wonder if The Record's editors talk to one another.

If the edition has a theme, it would be perverted males and the exploitation of women, though the model in a "sexy" waitress outfit looks more like a teenager (Better Living front).

Boy Scout sex

Editor Marty Gottlieb leads the paper today with a report on "sexual misconduct" by New Jersey Boy Scout leaders dating to 1976, a story that first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes leads the Local news section with "parents on edge" over luring incidents in Hackensack, Maywood and four other towns (L-1).

Then, the Better Living cover reports on what's "hot" in Halloween costumes.

"You name it and it comes in a tight, skin-baring version," the story says of women's outfits (BL-8).

Calling all letchers.

Mass-transit news

The A-1 story on a two-week-old love triangle murder-suicide carries the byline of Richard Cowen, but the long, wordy lead paragraph resembles something you'd see in Gottlieb's old paper, The New York Times.

One of the victims was an NJ Transit bus driver -- the closest The Record gets to covering our overburdened mass-transit system.

In another A-1 story -- on the man arrested on charges of trying to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan -- reporters don't explain how he managed to get a parking space.

Guv's personal columnist 

Is political Columnist Charles Stile kidding when he describes Governor Christie as a rock star (Local front)?

How many 400-pound rock stars do you know?

Actually, Christie's weight is a mystery, because the obese Republican refuses to discuss that or his health.

Stile also says Christie is "a household brand." For what, pork belly?

I'm sure the reporter meant "household name" -- as in, "That scumbag Christie lied when he said he'd lower our property taxes."

Disorder in the court

Also on L-1 today, Staff Writer Kibret Markos has another report on the trial of two police officers on charges of "helping suspects with personal ties to then-Police Chief Ken Zisa."

It's bad enough Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, think Zisa and related stories are the only Hackensack news readers want.

The lazy, incompetent assignment editors still haven't explained why so few stories are reported from the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, one of the busiest in the state.

Looks like a winner

After months of writing off Democratic candidate Adam Gussen, a story on L-3 today reveals the newly configured 5th Congressional District includes 44 of Bergen County's 70 towns.

Seventy-two percent of its voters are registered in heavily Democratic Bergen County.

Gussen, the deputy mayor in Teaneck, spoke to the paper's unnamed Editorial Board, and said his bid to unseat arch-conservative Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantange, "really is winnable."

The Record published a long, flattering profile of Garrett, one of Congress' chief naysayers, but a Gussen profile still hasn't appeared.


Related articles

• Editors continue to ignore local Democrat
• Oh, so that's what the challenger looks like
• Columnist jumps back in bed with Christie
• Does our obese governor hate poor kids?
• Editors hit positive change in Hackensack

Picture a dysfunctional assignment desk

Image by Pragmagraphr via Flickr

The Record's assignment editors read a lot of competing papers to get ideas.

Editor Francis Scandale's desperation is clear today with the ho-hum photo of a small fire on a utility pole as the major Page 1 art.

With pedestrians slip-sliding all over the place, cars smacking into each other on icy roads, government-backed thugs battling protesters in Cairo -- there were so many other photo possibilities. Why this? 

Waiting for spring

Has the assignment desk run out of ideas? Are head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and minions Dan Sforza, Christina Joseph, Rich Whitby, etc. hunkering down to wait for spring?

The Page 1 story in the package with that utility pole fire is stiffly written by reporter Colleen Diskin, who reels off "life-management skills, "elastic child-care arrangements" and other jargon in telling the story of parents scrambling to handle weather-related school-opening delays, early dismissals and closings. 

Smoking out news

Kibret Markos, the reporter assigned to the busy Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, should be applauded for writing about something besides the usual trials, indictments and lawsuits -- most of which he misses while on smoking breaks outside the Main Street entrance to the building. 

Today, he leads the paper with launching of The Last Resort Exoneration Project for wrongly convicted inmates in New Jersey -- ahead of the official announcement. Why the quote marks around the project name on A-1?

Clean-out of the troubled, smelly Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissioners continues and The Record of Woodland Park continues to play it on A-1. A rare, fourth story on the front is another Charles Stile column on political slush funds.

Editors bite readers

Two stories that are of much wider interest than the political ones are relegated to A-3: toll hikes and computer problems affecting the unemployed and customers at motor vehicle agency offices.

Is that all Sykes had to lead her section -- a follow-up on the Fair Lawn man who got bit by his pet cobra? He was instantly forgettable. (A correction on A-2 notes the four reporters who worked on the A-1 cobra-bite article Wednesday misspelled the name of an expert they quoted.)

Advisory on comments

Image by Ari Hahn via Flickr

I welcome your comments, as I have said before, but I will no longer publish any personal attacks or other mean-spirited sniping. If you want to bury yourself with your own words, you are welcome to do so. Just leave me out of it.

I have deleted or edited some of the comments published previously, and I'll feel free to reject any comment in the future -- especially the schoolmarmish ones that scold me for my manners and so forth.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of anything anyone says in a comment.

Also, I am not interested in your interpretation of the Superior Court jury's verdict in the trial of my age-discrimination suit, the evidence or anything else. There is a strong New Jersey law against age discrimination, and I had a right to file suit and try the case to the best of my ability. 

I don't regret anything I did, and I am weighing an appeal of some of the judge's rulings that I objected to -- with the goal of winning a new trial.