Journalism jock itch rules again

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Even when the Yankees lose, Editor Francis Scandale just can't stop the itching from his jock strap and resist the need to slap the other male editors' asses in the news meeting, where he undoubtedly ordered the layout drones to cover most of the front page today with a photo and caption about those turkeys.

The other stories on Page 1 of The Record of Woodland Park are more federal fine-tuning on the cost of the Hudson River tunnel Governor Christie dislikes so much, a story about charter school teachers who have joined a union and another on third-party candidates. 

How boring can you get? A-1 seems to alternate between gory, tabloid news and process stories that put readers to sleep. 

In Local, Hackensdack reporter Monsy Alvarado has the second story in three days on the possible rezoning of the struggling Main Street shopping district -- after she ignored public forums on the proposals held in the past couple of months.


Today's story reports the City Council on Thursday night hired a planner and an attorney "to help revamp zoning regulations along Main Street." Why is this buried on L-3?


Gee, I'm surprised the city doesn't already have enough planners and attorneys to do the job in-house. Alvarado reports Douglas Doyle of the DeCotiss Fitzpatrick & Cole law firm will be paid $125 an hour. The hourly rate for Planner Francis Reiner isn't given.

The reporter doesn't quote one of the city's many gadflies on the need to hire them.


City taxpayers should be concerned because the Main Street Business Alliance hired Street-Works LLC of New York to work up a detailed proposal for rezoning Main Street, with specific suggestions on what kind of developers could be invited to remake downtown, including a return to two-way traffic.


Is the planner and attorney hired by the council just going to duplicate that work?

See previous post on the first anniversary
of Eye on The Record

Rich, white men running amok

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Without a new rail tunnel to Manhattan, riders will just have to cope with crowded conditions.

It's all right here on today's front page of The Record of Woodland Park: The first and second colossal blunders by Governor Christie, who has now jeopardized $3 billion in federal money for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson. New Jersey also may have to return $300 million -- that's on top of the $400 million in federal education aid Christie and his education czar blew this summer.


But Alfred P. Doblin, editor of the editorial page, supports the governor's decision on the rail tunnel (A-16), which Doblin has opposed from the start. 

And Desk Warrior John Cichowski doesn't have the balls to tell readers whether mass transit or roads are the key to New Jersey's future (A-9). Did Chick interview train riders at the Morristown station because it was close to his home?

Poor Tyler Clementi. The Rutgers student from Ridgewood, who jumped from the GWB Bridge on Sept. 22 after he was outted in an Internet video, gets bounced off the front page today to make way for rich, white men running amok.

While Christie destroys New Jersey, Publisher Greedy Stevie Borg is doing the same to The Record. Borg, with the help of Editors Francis Scandale and Deirdre Sykes, is slowly destroying the daily's reputation as a hometown newspaper for Bergen County residents in such communities as Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and too many others to list.

Since he took office in January, Christie has catered to the Borgs and his wealthy, white supporters by refusing to enact a special tax on millionaires or even raising the low gas tax, lest all his rich, gas-guzzling friends have to dig deeper to fill the tanks of their SUVs.  


His unilateral decision to scuttle the rail tunnel project won't affect his friends, who undoubtedly drive or are driven into Manhattan, where their tolls, parking and other expenses are covered by their employers. Christie is just screwing middle-class rail riders, just as he screwed the middle and working classes with all his budget cuts.  


In Local, head Assignment Editor Sykes comes up for air in time to direct Monsy Alvarado to catch up to a story on a new home for the Boys & Girls Club in Hackensack (L-11) that has already appeared in The County Seat, the weekly published by the Zisa family (not Hackensack Chronicle, as I wrote originally).


Since Aug. 13, only two municipal stories about Englewood have appeared in the paper, and neither  were by Englewood reporter Giovanna Fabiano. Was she re-assigned? Englewood is where Mac Borg lives on the East Hill and where he raised his two spoiled brats, Stephen and Jennifer, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and commutes to Woodland Park in a gas-guzzling Range Rover SUV.


In the Better Living centerfold today, the puzzling headline over a review of La Lanterna in Ridgewood beckons to readers: "At home with family." Really? Whose family?  Would I feel like family? That's unlikely. Do I have to take my family there to feel that way?


Staff Writer Elisa Ung praises the crab cakes, which use angel-hair pasta as a binder "instead of bread." Apparently, she has never having heard of crab cakes that use neither as a binder. Because of cost-cutting, she samples only four entrees, but she makes sure she tries four desserts, as well.


Despite yellowing arugula in a $13.95 salad (!) and a co-owner who recites specials without revealing prices, Ung gives the restaurant two and a half stars (good to excellent). She gave two stars to a mediocre, faux-Caribbean chain restaurant in Wayne called Bahama Breeze -- making many of her other ratings suspect.


While all this space is given to her reviews, fewer restaurant health inspections appear. Today's list include only a fraction of the 90 or so towns in the paper's circulation area.