Road Warrior can't read the calendar

Chairman Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg's boyhood home in Hackensack.

Editor's note: In his Road Warrior column on Sunday, Staff Writer John Cichowski said it has been a "full four months" since Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29. In fact, the three-month anniversary passed only five days before. Earlier, Cichowski incorrectly reported the day a train smashed into a tractor-trailer in Little Falls. Those glaring errors weren't caught by six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton or her clueless staff.

The inactivity of writing the vast majority of his Road Warrior columns from news releases, studies, reports and reader e-mails has caught up to Staff Writer John Cichowski, who rarely leaves his computer to do any legwork.

Here is part of another e-mail to management from a reader who is alarmed by all of the misinformation Cichowski passes along to readers:

"The Road Warrior continues to hand out misinformed, false, and exaggerated nonsense to commuters, who are desperate for real answers about repairs to Sandy-damaged rail stations.

"Road Warrior babbles more nonsense about how it has been four months since Sandy, when it has been a little over 3 months. This is after he babbled in his Jan. 25 column that it was 8 weeks, when it was really 12 weeks, since Sandy.

"Why doesn't The Record correct his nonsense before it is published?

"Mistaken column by mistaken column, it is becoming too much for readers to forgive.

"Instead of misinformation and false complaints, why didn't the Road Warrior notify readers about an upcoming NJ Transit commuter forum at Hoboken rail station on Feb. 12 so that they could voice their concerns directly to transit officials?"

Read the full text of the e-mail on the Facebook Bloopers page:

Time flies for the Road Warrior 



Levitating mayor

Ed Koch was such a great New York City mayor his powers apparently survived him, according to today's Page 1 photo caption.

The caption suggested the casket wasn't carried, but actually levitated out of the Fifth Avenue synagogue on Monday: 

"The casket of former Mayor Ed Koch left the funeral at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue."

On A-2, a correction tells readers a Sunday caption listed Alicia Rose, but that she wasn't actually in the photo. Oops.

After years of practicing body count journalism in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Associated Press actually supplied a photo of Kabul residents who weren't being blown apart by a suicide bomber (A-2).

Who knew there was any normalcy in war-torn Afghanistan? But I question the photo overline, "SHOT OF THE DAY." 

The doughnut hole

The morbidly obese Governor Christie actually pulled out a doughnut and ate it during taping of the David Letterman TV show on Monday (A-4).

In 2011, Letterman put Christie's weight at 400 pounds. 

Now, we know what Christie is going to do after he loses his bid for a second term: open a Dunkin' Donuts franchise.

The money game

The Record is already covering the campaign, and will accord space to Christie and Democrat Barbara Buono based on how much special interest money they raise (A-4), just as the Woodland Park daily did with North Jersey congressional candidates last November.

Four photos with one story threw Production Editor Liz Houlton's copy editors into a dither (A-7). The caption refers to a photo as "adjacent," a word that should never be used.

Those old coots

On the front of Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes lampoons another elderly driver who apparently mistook the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal, and backed his car out of a garage and into a stream (L-1).

After years of publishing photos of senior crashes and other mayhem, some of it fatal, you'd think Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, would realize older drivers need information on where they can go to refresh their skills. 

Five paragraphs of Hackensack news appear on L-3 today. That's all she wrote. 

Sykes and Sforza continue to mystify readers by running minor accident photos on their front, and burying the obits of fascinating North Jersey residents, such as rememberances of Guy Tozzoli and Jack Reno on L-8 today. 

It's time to demand more from the police

This Dunkin' Donuts in Geneva, N.Y., looks exactly like the one on Passaic Street, near the tracks, in Hackensack.

The Record's editors continue to wring their hands over the attempted luring of children, with a Page 1 story today and the lead on Friday's Local news section.

They did the same recently over gun violence in Paterson and a string of burglaries that were getting uncomfortably close to Publisher Stephen A. Borg's $3.65 million mansion in Tenafly.

But none of these stories discussed the effectiveness of the police. 

Are the cops -- especially all those small-town police chiefs -- letting us down?

These chiefs often make north of $200,000 a year. What do they do besides draw up the schedule of runs to Dunkin' Donuts?

Christie loves donuts, chiefs

The Record has praised Governor Christie for capping the salaries of school superintendents, but no editor has questioned why he didn't do the same with police chiefs, including nearly 70 in Bergen County alone.

The reason for the editorial free ride may lie in the incompetence of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her minions, including Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza.

Sykes and Sforza have ordered their reporters to stake out police departments and prosecutor's offices, waiting for press releases.

In small departments, the chief often is the only one who gives out information on crime.

A newsroom so dependent on handouts can't afford to come down hard on the police for not doing their job protecting residents.

New news reality

In the Page 1 story today, luring cases are called "part of [the] new reality."

The same can be said of declining municipal news coverage in The Record, which is relying more and more on covering crime and less and less on what the police and town officials are or are not doing.

Today's Local front carries a story on Englewood merchants complaining about gas-line work disrupting their business (L-1) -- the third story about that city this week.

Where are similar stories about Hackensack's downtown and finances?

Missing the story

Today's Englewood story carries a clunky headline, attributing complaints to inanimate "stores." This would have fit:

Merchants bitch

about utility work

The story also ignores Englewood's longtime reputation for horrendous downtown traffic congestion, aggravated by the Police Department's refusal to carve out turn lanes on Dean Street at Palisade Avenue.

Installing turn lanes there would lead to the removal of several parking meters, but Englewood's well-known financial problems prevent that.

Wealthy wage war

Today's major Page 1 story -- "Leading the money race" -- puts to rest any doubt that wealthy Republicans, including donors to Christie and Mitt Romney, are waging a war against the rest of us, especially the middle class.

The nation's economy is struggling, as President Obama has stated so persuasively, because of the unbridled greed of the wealthy, who would rather keep more of their profits and spend much less on creating jobs and paying benefits.

Christie and jobless

Is it any wonder New Jersey's jobless rate remained above 9 percent for the 40th consecutive month (A-1 and A-18 on Friday), while the Christies made about $118,000 more in 2011 than the year before (A-3 on Friday)?

Or that Romney -- who makes $20 million a year from investments -- is promising to cut taxes on capital gains and other investment income for wealthy people like himself?

Flawed food writing

Bob Probert is one of (201) magazine's uninformed food writers whose work has appeared in The Record in recent months.

In today's Starters piece on a Lebanese restaurant called La'Mezza (BL-1), he says incorrectly a complimentary starter includes "baked pita chips called zaatar."

Za'atar is a Middle Eastern thyme mixture that can be served on fresh or baked bread or sprinkled on tomatoes, eggs, roast chicken and other food.

No admittance to 'rowdy'

In Friday's Better Living tabloid, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung wasted a quarter of her 3-star appraisal of Zana D discussing the owner's career and changes in the decor of the restaurant he bought.

So there wasn't any room to tell readers whether free-range chicken, antibiotic-free meat or low-mercury fish is served by the pricey Tenafly dining spot (BL-18 and 19).

Does a restaurant that apparently cuts corners on naturally raised or grown food even deserve an "Excellent" rating?


However, the clueless Ung made sure to advise readers the restaurant is "less appropriate for" a "rowdy gathering, particularly of younger people, who may feel out of place in the older crowd" (data box, BL-18).

You could describe the majority of readers as an "older crowd." Isn't that discriminatory?

Is advice on what a fine-dining restaurant "would be good for" or "less appropriate for" even necessary? 

Use the room to tell restaurant goers what really matters: Is the food free of such harmful additives as growth hormones and animal by-products?

Dunkin' cops surrender to house burglars

In some North Jersey towns, these are among the basic tools for fighting a wave of house burglaries.

Can anyone find even a single word on the front-page of The Record today on what police departments in North Jersey are doing to prevent house burglaries?

Did you find any mention in the elaborate photo and text package of roving undercover or plainclothes officers or prosecutors and sheriffs setting up a pawn shop to catch the suspects red-handed (A-1 and A-8)?

I don't know whether the two reporters whose bylines appear on Page 1 are inexperienced or seasoned.

But Editor Marty Gottlieb, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza should know enough not to be duped into presenting an elaborate justification for why police cannot stop or even solve a lot of these crimes.

Before noon today, I saw a Leonia police SUV stationed a block away from a slowly moving funeral procession of fire vehicles in Bogota, and at least one of the officers was drinking coffee from Dunkin' Donuts.

Talk about reinforcing a stereotype. 

What, me worry?

Gottlieb is downplaying a looming budget crisis, relegating another story on Governor Christie's position to A-3 today.

The Democrats' Assembly majority leader, Lou Greenwald, D-Camden, is quoted as saying:

"Everything is falling down around this governor and he's incapable of recognizing he is protecting two-tenths of 1 percent of the population" -- a reference to the GOP bully's refusal to approve an income-tax surcharge on millionaires.

Bad headline

The worst headline of the day appears on the front of Sykes' Local section:

Englewood school protest returns

Prompting many readers to ask themselves, Return from where, vacation?

Readers must pitch in 

That headline and a photo on L-3 today may be part of Sykes' and Sforza's focus on participatory journalism, which attempts to engage the reader in what little local news appears in the Woodland Park daily.

The L-3 accident photo, taken around 10 p.m., shows lights and a lot of first responders standing around.

Readers are asked to send in what else they can see in the photo in the hope of winning lunch with Sykes and Sforza in the cafeteria.

A similar contest is being held for the business photo on L-8 that is missing a caption. 

On L-6, a brief describes how three burglars attacked an Englewood woman in her Jones Road home.

Hackensack news? It's on vacation, and readers are hoping it returns soon.