Editors manage to find bright side of high N.J. jobless rate

On North Woodland Street in Englewood, drivers doing an end run on Monday morning around one of the city's new automated garbage trucks. Later, when the truck moved over to pass a jogger on the right side of the street, a car traveling in the opposite direction nearly hit it.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

"U.S.," "New York" and "Cuba" are just three of the headline words on Page 1 of The Record, supposedly a local daily newspaper.

The funeral of a police officer who died in an ATV accident and shore taffy are promoted in front-page briefs, but an editorial on A-8 is the first word readers find on the death of a corruption-fighting former mayor.

Neither today's editorial or the L-1 obituary on Margie Semler, 92, refer to the other piece, as is common newspaper practice.

And in yet another major error, Monday's Page 1 story on the death of Joseph Robinson Jr., oldest son of the founders of Sugar Hill Records in Englewood, misreported the date of his wake and funeral by an entire week (A-2).

That comes just when readers thought a local black resident doesn't have to commit a heinous crime to get on the front page of the Woodland Park daily.

Wrong focus

The lead A-1 headline today focuses on a national increase in traffic deaths, not on the decline in New Jersey that concerns readers most.

And in what could be viewed as more gentle handling of Governor Christie, the story reports the state's high unemployment rate may be reducing both driving and fatal crashes.

In nearly a dozen years of writing the Road Warrior column, Staff Writer John Cichowski has largely ignored the antiquated road and street network in Bergen and Passaic counties.

The lack of turn lanes on such major thoroughfares as Passaic Street, Teaneck Road and Forest Avenue; streets like Cedar Lane that go from two lanes to one lane and back again, and other traffic bottlenecks increase driver frustration, aggravate air pollution and cause accidents.

Margie Semler

If you read between the lines, the editorial on former Passaic Mayor Margie Semler makes clear she had little in common with politicians in such towns as Cliffside Park and Englewood Cliffs, long ruled by family dynasties, and Hackensack, which threw off the yoke of the Zisa family in 2013 (A-8).

"Semler's backbone was evident to anyone who knew her," the editorial states. "She spoke her mind when she saw something wrong. She spoke out against nepotism in city government, and against deal-making that she perceived as harming the overall health of the city she loved so much."

Christopher Birch

The lavish coverage of the funeral of a Midland Park police officer who contributed to his own off-duty death is an insult to readers looking for municipal news (A-1 and L-1).

According to Pennsylvania State Police, Christopher Birch, 31, was driving too fast on July 6, failed to negotiate a turn, left the road and crashed into a large boulder.

He was pronounced dead at the scene of the ATV crash.

Many readers suspect Birch's funeral is getting such big play, because Assignment Editors Deirdre Sykes and Dan Sforza hope that will lead to better relations with police departments in Midland Park and elsewhere.

Sykes and Sforza, who rely so heavily on Law & Order news to fill their thin Local section, need the continuing cooperation of those departments. 

Another error

Typical of the police filler Sykes and Sforza seek so desperately is the photo on L-2 today of a car that crashed into an Englewood laundromat.

The photo caption incorrectly identifies the car as a Toyota Prius, and the street where the crash occurred isn't given.

Seven other Law & Order stories appear in Local today (L-2 and L-3).

Francis Scandale

Former Record Editor Francis "Frank" Scandale is now investigative editor for The Journal News Media Group in White Plains.

Scandale also continues as the founder and editor of The Daily Payoff, "the only U.S.-based site dedicated to coverage of gaming and gambling in the U.S. and abroad," according to his Linked In profile.

In November 2011, Scandale left as editor and executive vice president of The Record after 10 years and 11 months.

He was shown the door by Publisher Stephen A. Borg in response to the paper's pathetically poor coverage of a surprise Halloween snowstorm.

Early in his career as one of The Record's worst editors ever, Scandale caved into the bean counters on 9/11, and didn't remake the front page for Tom Franklin's photo of firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the Twin Towers.

Putting a photo no other paper had on a back page to save money certainly put the kabosh on Franklin's bid for a Pulitzer Prize.

And journalism's biggest award continued to elude Scandale, as it has his successor, former New York Times editor and reporter Martin Gottlieb.

Scandale also helped implement a major Borg-inspired downsizing in the old newsroom in 2008, followed by the 2009 closure of North Jersey Media Group headquarters in Hackensack.

Editors are exploiting every misery in Paterson

As commuters streamed by on a chilly spring day this week, homeless men and women warmed themselves with coffee inside the main NJ Transit entrance of Penn Station in Manhattan.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I pity readers who rely on The Record of Woodland Park for their knowledge of Paterson, a pioneering industrial center that harnessed the power of the Great Falls and immigrant workers to earn the title of "Silk City."

Under former Editor Francis "Frank" Scandale, Paterson was most often portrayed as a drug bazaar that lured white suburbanites, many of whom overdosed and met untimely deaths.

In a boneheaded decision, Scandale even ran a map showing readers where they could find drug dealers, and never put the city's Police Department on the spot for lax enforcement.

Editor Marty Gottlieb exploited that same Paterson theme in a 2013 series on North Jersey's heroin epidemic, and the stories were among the finalists in this year's Pulitzer Prize competition.

Drive-by shootings and murders, spectacular and often deadly fires in slum dwellings, failing schools, greedy public officials, South Paterson as the neighborhood that harbored 9/11 hijackers -- every negative has been exploited by The Record's editors to sell papers.

Today, Page 1 screams about "shocking ... blood and cruelty" after two people were arrested for running a dog-fighting ring and 21 pit bulls were rescued by Paterson's John DeCando, North Jersey's most-visible animal control officer (A-1).

Race based?

Another front-page story today doesn't discuss the racial makeup of Ramapo, N.Y., where Ford Motor Co. has been ordered to remove "almost all of the toxic paint sludge" the automaker dumped there decades ago, in contrast to a plan to cap much more Ford waste a few miles away in Ringwood. (A-1).

Readers have no way of knowing whether the Rockland County, N.Y., town is being treated differently than the Upper Ringwood neighborhood, because of discrimination against mixed-race Ramapoughs who live in the North Jersey community.

GWB scandal

Readers who have called on The Record and other media "to move on" and stop writing about the George Washington Bridge scandal were greeted by another front-page story today that explores for the first time lawyer David Samson's influence in the Christie administration (A-1).

Samson has been called a mentor and father figure to Governor Christie, who named the lawyer chairman of the Port Authority, where he ran interference for clients of his law firm, Wolff & Samson.

The powerful lawyer is among members of Christie's inner circle who resigned in the wake of allegations of political retribution against Democrats in the months before last November's election.

Christ and potholes

The Local section today manages to wrap up in a single story Easter, the suffering of Christ and how an actor injured himself on a Paterson pothole that hasn't been repaired weeks after the end of a brutal winter (L-1).

Why does it take a Good Friday procession to get the editors to dramatize the danger of all of those still-gaping potholes on streets and highways in North Jersey? 

Second looks

The Record's lazy local-news editors ran a Page 1 story on Thursday, praising Hackensack Police Officer Victor Vazquez for saving the life of an elderly woman, arresting a suspect in a violent robbery and assisting in the arrest of two drug suspects on Route 80.

But the story wasn't based on original reporting. 

Jerry DeMarco's CliffviewPilot.com ran a piece on the cop's exploits two days earlier. 

Meanwhile, a concerned reader e-mailed managers and editors of The Record, reporting that Road Warrior John Cichowski "confused and misled readers in his Sunday and Tuesday columns about the dangers, state regulations and a recent crackdown on driving while talking or texting on handheld cellphones."

See the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers, which chronicles all of the befuddled reporter's many errors in these and past columns:

More errors on a familiar Road Warrior theme

Facts can't curb out-of-control Road Warrior

Editors resume their public relations for Christie

In Fort Lee, construction work is under way on a site across Park Avenue from the 47-story residential tower that is visible from almost everywhere in the borough, above and below. There is no indication whether a second residential tower like the first is going up at the site, which also is across the street from the George Washington Bridge local access lanes that are at the center of the Bridgegate political-retribution scandal.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

All the signs are there that The Record's editors, columnists and reporters are resuming their work of repairing Governor Christie's battered image.

It isn't news that a prominent Republican lawyer Christie hired to conduct an "internal" investigation, and the attorney's staff, which has ties to the governor, may have cleared him, but it is all over Page 1 today.

And what did readers turned off by Charles Stile's political columns do to deserve two "he's-not-as-bad-as-he-seems" columns on the front page today and Monday?

So far, the internal probe has cost taxpayers more than $1 million.

It's hard to understand how the editors and Christie's allies see such positive signs when members of the governor's inner-circle continue to stonewall on turning documents over to the state Legislature's Bridgegate investigative committee (A-6).

Men are animals

If you classify this latest flurry of stories about the GOP bully as "animal news," the Woodland Park daily seems to be devoting a lot of space lately to four-legged species.

Witness Sunday's front page, where a so-called debate over a pro athlete's dog-fighting conviction played out.

Today, the front of Local and L-3 are dominated by tear-jerking horse and dog rescue stories.

I guess nothing was going on in Hackensack, Teaneck and other towns that are missing from today's Local section, which is put out by editors who some would call "horse's asses."

Tesla rescue?

The first Business page today reports a Bergen County legislator wants to make it legal for Tesla to sell its revolutionary electric car directly to New Jersey consumers (L-7).

The company's CEO says Christie and New Jersey auto dealers made a "backroom deal" to stop Tesla from selling its Model S premium sedan from Paramus and Short Hills showrooms.

"The governor talks a big game about attracting innovative businesses to the state, but this move does the exact opposite," says Assemblyman Timothy Eustace, D-Paramus, sponsor of a bill to amend the restrictive law.

The only editorial comment on the controversy came from freelance cartoonist Margulies on Sunday's O-2, which showed Christie telling a kid at a 5-cents lemonade stand he can't sell directly and has to go through "a beverage dealer." 

Funeral home cops

Monday's Page 1 story on retired police officers who work at North Jersey funeral homes may help rehabilitate their image, which the paper savaged in a series of stories on high salaries and pensions when Francis "Frank" Scandale was running the newsroom.

The paper argued that high teacher and police salaries were the chief cause of municipalities' financial problems.

But why does Monday's story have two photos of the same man, Sal Arena, who was a captain on the Pompton Lakes force?

My vacation from fuzzy, amateurish journalism

The line was long and slow moving on Friday at Starbucks Coffee in the New Jersey Turnpike's Thomas Edison Service Area. Speeders, tailgaters, weavers and other aggressive drivers were plentiful on the turnpike and Garden State Parkway, but state police were scarce -- a lack of enforcement The Record continues to ignore.



By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

It's always good to get away from New Jersey and The Record's fuzzy journalism.

I spent several days in Montreal, and didn't read any newspapers, but I did glance at The Globe and Mail, the widely respected national daily published in Toronto.

Returning home on Thursday, I found looking over unread Records a real chore.

I left last Sunday, when The Record's front page was dominated by the 25th anniversary of the Hackensack Ford fire that killed 5 of the city's bravest.

I remember seeing the fire from the newsroom's fourth-floor library on July 1, 1988, when I was a reporter assigned to cover business news.

Major local news

The pathetic Local news section on June 30 led with a real North Jersey scourge: feral cats (L-1).

The Road Warrior column that day continued Staff Writer John Cichowski's minute examination of driving and parking issues with breaking news about repairs to the Route 46 bridge "this fall" (L-1).

The next day, July 1, The Record's front page carried a large photo of a memorial to the 5 firefighters who died in the Hackensack Ford fire.

Falling asleep over A-1

The rest of A-1 is a real snoozer, typical of the balanced approach to boredom under Editor Marty Gottlieb, once a prominent journalist at The New York Times:

The stories were a "new era" at Rutgers University,
a political column on Sen. Jeffrey "Who?" Chiesa, R-N.J.; and a lawsuit filed against Paterson police officers who allegedly beat two handcuffed men.

Dissing Paterson

Under Gottlieb, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes; and Gottlieb's predecessor, Francis Scandale, Paterson has been treated as little more than a center of drugs and prostitution.

The Record has completely ignored the inability of the Silk City's Police Department and its overpaid police chief to protect residents from drive-by shootings and other gun violence -- even before Governor Christie's cut in state aid forced the layoff of 125 cops.

Accident filler

On the July 1 Local front, Sykes ran another filler photo of an overturned car and first responders standing around bullshitting, complete with a photo caption that contained "no information."

The swearing in of a reform City Council in Hackensack ran as an afterthought on a July 2 front page dominated by the memorial service for 19 firefighters in Arizona, and a second arrest in the murder of a Wayne teen (A-1).

Bad headline

The headline on the Hackensack story is a real clunker -- what readers have come to expect from Production Editor Liz Houlton:

Changes

right off 

the top 

"Off the top" is a phrase used in barber shops, but whoever wrote this headline probably was looking for "at the top" to describe replacement of three professionals tied to the Zisa political family.

And I didn't see any interviews with residents who wanted to say good riddance to the four Zisa family allies who wreaked havoc during their 8 years on the council.

Mayor Michael Melfi and the others allowed Ken Zisa to run amuck as police chief instead of firing him many years ago.

On July 3, Road Warrior John Cichowski actually expected readers to believe adults "lose track" of children in the back seat, leading to their death from heat stroke (L-1).

Another food scam

On July 4, Better Living acquainted readers with so-called foodie Sameer Sarmast's Halal Food Tour, set for tomorrow at the armory in Teaneck (BL-1).

A previous report on June 24 omitted the hours, noon to 8 p.m.

But the paper lets down readers, as it has done so many times when discussing kosher meat and poultry, which are more expensive than non-kosher food.

Kosher and halal meat and poultry don't guarantee higher quality; the vast majority of animals are raised with harmful antibiotics and growth hormones, and higher prices aren't justified.

Real fishy

Freelance Julia Sexton continued The Record's promotion of fattening, artery clogging desserts on Friday in her lukewarm review of Ridgewood Fare, another overpriced restaurant (BL-16).

Sexton didn't like some of the food, including the $22 mahi mahi taco her husband ordered, but she goofed when she referred to the fish as "none-too-fresh tuna."

Mahi mahi is also known as dolphin fish; it isn't related to tuna.

More problems

Today's paper is filled with sloppy, amateurish journalism.

Readers might wonder why the lead story on Page 1 doesn't refer to the Jersey shore until they get to the continuation page and learn the gas pipeline would be 8.5 miles closer to Jones Beach in New York than to Long Branch, which is 28 miles away from the planned route (A-6).

As do past stories, the umpteenth report on LG's controversial plan to build a 143-foot-high corporate headquarters fails to emphasize the building would be built on top of the tree-shrouded Palisades, between Sylvan Avenue and the Hudson River (A-1).

The description used now -- "along Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs above the Palisades" -- is too vague.

No news here

On the Local front, a huge photo of a house fire in Cliffside Park is complete with a caption that tells readers nothing beyond what they can see (L-1).

Finally, in a story on today's Local front, does The Record really expect readers to believe a group of Passaic city natives actually drank water from the polluted Passaic River (L-1)?

Growing diversity, but not in the newsroom

The City of Hackensack may declare about 20 acres along River Street, owned by North Jersey Media Group, as an area in need of rehabilitation. The Borgs haven't disclosed their plan for the property, once the headquarters of NJMG and The Record.

A black president fills his inaugural speech with a bold message of inclusion. Meanwhile, New Jersey is growing more diverse by the day.

The only place that resists change is the Woodland Park newsroom of The Record, where five white male columnists toil away at making their tired prose seem fresh.

All five wrote columns on Sunday, leaving most readers speechless. 

Three of them have been column writing for about 20 years each. God save us.

News turnstile

On Page 1, political columnist Charles Stile switched from finding 20 ways to praise Governor Christie to discussing President Obama's second term and how the "hope for change still runs deep."

Stile is back on the front page today, declaring that Obama's inaugural speech signals a "liberal era of government."

Gee. Both columns are stale; in fact, they could have been written four years ago.

Mass-transit hater

In more than 9 years of posing as the Road Warrior and writing a so-called commuting column, Staff Writer John Cichowski has never ridden a bus or a train and reported on the quality of service.

On Sunday, he took a positive development at a rail station in Teterboro -- the installation of an 8-foot fence to prevent people from getting killed by trains -- and turned it into a negative (Local front).

A reader concerned about the lack of accuracy in Road Warrior columns had this to say:

"The Road Warrior's Jan. 20 column manages to deceive someone included in his story, as well as commuters who want better access to the Teterboro station.

"How the Road Warrior also mangles and distorts a well-known Henny Youngman punch line is simply beyond belief to admirers of the comedian.

"That reminds me. The Road Warrior NEVER listens to readers if they say they have facts that contradict his unsubstantiated stories. At least, the Road Warrior thinks that's what they said.

"Let us hope this commuter access problem can be solved with a better solution, which has already been proposed, that was NOT among the complex or unsafe solutions reported in the column. "

See the reader's full comments at the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers:   

Butchering Henny Youngman


Frugal journalist

Kevin DeMarrais writes the paper's only consumer column from an intensely personal point of view, but that means he doesn't recognize the growing trend of organic and other naturally raised food.

On Sunday, his column discussed how he got a replacement for a malfunctioning camera, and told a tale of woe about buying a box of crackers for holiday parties and finding "that nearly every cracker was broken" (B-1).

Jeez. How trivial can he get? I'm wondering why the cheapskate serves his guests crackers in the first place.  

Readers get crumbs

What did that great journalist, Mike Kelly, fill his Sunday column with (O-1)?

He calls it "a tale of happenstance and fragility" -- a squirrel bit into a line and knocked out power to residents of Teaneck, where Kelly lives.

Kelly followed with a column on Monday's Local front -- about a pair of eagles, "the saga of Al and Alice" -- but this isn't just another animal story.

Kelly tells readers this is nothing less than the collision of "America's national symbol" and the "fundamental American right to control development of their land."

In truth, his columns are for the birds.  

A laughing stock 

Last but not least in this sad lineup of white male columnist is Bill Ervolino, who readers laugh at, not with.

His Sunday column was about a minor car accident involving a friend named Chicklet and three others involving Ervolino himself (BL-3). 

Hilarious, right?

The Record once had diverse voices in its news columns -- an African-American, a Cuban exile, a woman.

But Francis "Frank" Scandale, the last editor, put an end to that, leaving readers with these five turkeys.

Broken English  

Production Editor Liz Houlton, supervisor of the copy desk, continues to mangle the English language in headlines and captions.

"Eke" and "eking" are used with "out," as in "he is barely eking out a living," but on Sunday's Page 1, Houlton came up with this awkward sub-headline:

"Sandy's trailer park victims barely eking by"  

 

PSE&G continues to keep us in the dark

Is this why Hackensack's Fairmount section lost its lights?

On the third day after Super Storm Sandy hit North Jersey hard, much of Hackensack remains in the dark.

I called the police this morning to ask two things:

When is a large tree that brought down power lines around the corner and snapped three utility poles going to be removed?

Doesn't an unusually loud generator being used by the man in the house behind me violate anti-noise ordinances when it is run all night?

The officer said Public Service Electric
and Gas Co. has its own tree-removal crews in the event wires are involved.

A PSE&G employee wouldn't address the mess at Euclid and Prospect avenues specifically, but said power may be restored by Monday.

As for the noisy generator, the officer said it is a state of emergency.

Last night, on returning from dinner out in Palisades Park, we found few working traffic lights, closed roads and much of Hackensack's Main Street eerily dark.

We saw about 75 people with gas cans lined up at the Liberty station in Bogota, and one man who said he needed gasoline for his generator but didn't want to wait that long to get it.

In Hackensack, Costco Wholesale and the Coach House Diner were closed, but drivers continued to line up on Hackensack Avenue to enter a Dunkin' Donuts at University Place.

On trips to and from Englewood and Palisades Park on Wednesday, I saw not a single PSE&G crew repairing downed wires or clearing fallen trees.

No one I asked had seen a repair crew, either.

Did all of those crews I saw on Monday at Garden State Plaza, in what amounted to a public relations ploy by the public utility, race down to repair damage on the shore?

Sandy is proving to be a rerun of PSE&G's miserable performance after the freak snowstorm a year ago.

That pre-Halloween storm also proved to be the undoing of Francis "Frank" Scandale, then editor of The Record.

Let's hope the presidential election isn't déjà vu all over again -- with a Mitt Romney victory bringing us a rerun of the Bush years.

Last year, my power was out for 57 hours, and I was relatively lucky. This year, as of 7:30 this morning, we will have been without power for 60 hours.

UPDATE: This afternoon, on the way home from Target, I saw that the big fallen tree on Prospect Avenue, near Euclid Avenue, finally had been removed. But the downed power lines and snapped utility poles remained, and our electricity still is out.

Sandy's tears are flooding Hackensack

River and Kansas streets in Hackensack were under water before noon today. The flood waters from the nearby Hackensack River prompted Costco Wholesale to close its warehouse store early. A Subaru driver who may have shopped at Costco stalled after mistakenly believing his all-wheel-drive car could float.

Water from the Hackensack River blocked the service entrance to Hackensack Toyota.

The rain and wind couldn't suppress the need to pick up a few things at Costco.

Residents of Clinton Place in Hackensack -- between Summit and Prospect avenues -- took down most but not all of their Halloween decorations. The block is known far and wide for the show it puts on for the trick-or-treat holiday at the end of October.

More than 100 utility company trucks and other equipment, including spare utility poles, fill parking lots at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, above and below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I jumped into the car and drove around Hackensack and Paramus before noon today to see what I could see as Hurricane Sandy approached New Jersey.

I visited the staging area for crews from Public Service Electric and Gas Co. at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, where all the stores were closed.

On the other side of the highway, near IKEA, several drivers didn't bother stopping for red lights.

All that PSE&G equipment is a hopeful sign, given how the utility blew the job of repairing damage from the freak snowstorm two days before Halloween in 2011.

A year ago, as the days wore on with tens of thousands of people still without power, the anger of customers grew and there were reports of people threatening PSE&G workers with bodily harm.

What was the response at The Record of Woodland Park?

The paper's own poor job of covering the storm led to the firing of Editor Francis "Frank" Scandale at the hands of Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who finally pulled his head out of his pampered asshole.

However, Interim Editor Doug Clancy was uncomfortable with readers' anger at PSE&G, and consistently buried it deep in stories about storm recovery.

Even when many thousands were without power for a week or more, Clancy made sure stories prominently featured PSEG's excuses for why it couldn't move faster. 

This from the newspaper that once boasted in its motto: "Friend of The People It Serves." 

See previous post on media hype

 

Official incompetence gets a pass

Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, a city of haves and have-nots. When did The Record last publish a story on the high school's desegregation effort?

 
The Record today winks at official incompetence -- just as Editor Marty Gottlieb ignores the stubborn incompetence of all of the sub-editors he inherited at the end of January.

The front of the Business section is filled with a glowing profile of Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and her supposedly key role in Governor Christie's "business-friendly" push (A-1 and B-1).

What a joke. The state's unemployment rate is above 9% -- the highest in decades and higher than the nation's.

Maybe Guadagno should start sleeping with wealthy CEOs and small-business owners to get them to hire more workers.

Business Editor Bill Donnellon and Staff Writer Juliet Fletcher have already prostituted themselves with this ridiculous Guadagno story.

Christie's bribes -- in the form of hundreds of millions in business tax breaks and freedom from an income-tax surcharge -- have been miserable failures.

Crime on A-1

Gottlieb leads Page 1 of today's Sunday edition with a crime story, and another follow-up on a plan to "radically alter the landscape of Garret Mountain" -- The Record's home since 2009.

The third, major front-page story today only serves to remind readers of the paper's largely negative coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement a year ago (A-1).

Little local news

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, do their usual poor job with the Local news section.

The big news from Englewood is "fancy" Belgian block curbs replacing concrete -- not further strides in desegregating Dwight Morrow High School (L-3).

Sykes and Sforza couldn't find any Hackensack or Teaneck news today.

Road Warrior John Cichowski again ignores the needs of commuters with his flattering portrait of the Fort Lee Municipal Court judge (L-1).

The only mass transit news in the paper is on L-3 -- a photo and story relating how a train destroyed a gas-guzzling, polluting SUV.

The driver should get a public service award.

Back to Business

A consumer column on the Business front today quotes a trade association executive explaining the downsizing of food products as giving it to "demand ... for smaller packages."

Then, how does Food Institute President Brian Todd and Columnist Kevin DeMarrais explain the wild popularity of big sizes at Costco Wholesale, where you can still buy a 64-ounce half-gallon of Tropicana orange juice?

Despite a monthly trip "to check out prices and trends in North Jersey supermarkets," DeMarrais also continues to ignore organic food and naturally raised meat and poultry.

On a sugar high

On the Better Living front today, you'll find a rambling column from Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung, who refers to Utah and California in describing the experience of dining out in North Jersey (BL-1).

After at least three long front-page stories last week on the identification of Patricia Viola, who disappeared in 2001, couldn't Columnist Mike Kelly find anything else to write about (O-1)? 

He should disappear.

Mile High journalism

Did anybody read the cover story on Denver by klutzy Travel Editor Jill Schensul (T-1)?

Former newsroom staffers took one look and put the section in the recycling bin -- to avoid painful reminders of how Denver newspaper veteran Francis "Frank" Scandale screwed up The Record in his 11-plus years as editor.