Time to dump the restaurant reviewer

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In her first Sunday column since returning from a six-month maternity leave, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung informs readers: " We're in a period of transition here, reevaluating all aspects of our coverage of food and dining [an apparent reference to new Food Editor Susan Sherill]."What do you find the most useful? What would you like to see more of? What should we dump."


What should The Record of Woodland Park dump? In a word, Ung or, as I like to refer to her, Ugh.


That would complete a house cleaning that began with the presumably voluntary departure of her  previous boss, Bill Pitcher. 


In their restaurant reviews and other coverage,  Pitcher and Ung almost completely ignored rising consumer concern with how food is grown or raised on America's factory farms, while celebrating artery-clogging desserts and hamburgers made with drug- and hormone-filled beef, as Ung does in today's column.


Ung has been in the job since 2007, and came to The Record from the Philadelphia Inquirer. But I guess she has never learned journalists, including food writers, should be leaders, not followers. Ung and her editor should be setting the criteria for food coverage, not readers.


The imam as landlord


What exactly is the connection between poorly maintained North Jersey apartment buildings owned by a Muslim cleric and the mosque and Islamic cultural center he wants to build near Ground Zero (lead story and Mike Kelly column on Page 1 today)? 


This coverage, including a rare byline for Jean Rimbach, clearly is intended to smear the imam, because The Record has virtually ignored all the slumlords in Paterson and Passaic city over the years, despite fire deaths, lead-paint poisonings and all the other ills visited on their working-class and immigrant tenants.


The front page today has a lot of hard news, but the story on shootings in Paterson is difficult for the majority of readers in North Jersey to relate to. 

More change needed 
  

You wouldn't catch John Cichowski dead riding a train or bus to evaluate the service for his Road Warrior commuting column. But here he is today on the Local front with a blame-the-victim piece on pedestrians killed by trains. It's time for him to go, too.

Nowhere does he question the adequacy of fencing and other safety measures taken by NJ Transit to prevent those deaths. And Cichowski's claim that one man determined to kill himself tried suicide by train three times before he was successful raises a question the gullible reporter never asked: How did anyone know that?  

No Hackensack news appears in today's paper. 

Squelching reporters' instincts

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Under Editors Frank "Castrato" Scandale and Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, The Record of Woodland Park has become the kind of newspaper that waits for the news to arrive in neat packages, while pursuing ruinously expensive investigations that become mired in the editors' own laziness and incompetence.

Rather than ask reporters to do legwork, the clueless assignment desk sends them out to cover meetings, accidents and fires. They're never instructed to talk to residents of their town or even drive around and see what's new. Have you ever read a "Talk of The Town" from any of the 90 or so communities in the paper's circulation area?

Clerks deliver an endless stream of news releases, reports and studies that flow into the newsroom over fax machines, and these form the basis of many stories. Transportation reporters, for example, are loathe to ride and rate mass transit.

State, national and international wire service news fills the paper, but local aspects of those stories are ignored or covered routinely.

Look at today's dull front page. The sputtering economy is downplayed -- pushed down to the bottom of A-1, while high pay for special-ed CEOs leads the paper.

There's plenty of evidence the economic recovery has slowed in North Jersey, but local reporters take little notice, if they even visit the towns they are supposed to cover. Hundreds of new, unsold Toyotas have been lined up for weeks in a field behind a Hackensack dealer just a few blocks from the paper's old headquarters at 150 River St. The number of vacant storefronts or buildings continues to grow in business districts of Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other towns.

The Record has been running stories and columns about protests over planned Islamic cultural centers and mosques in Manhattan and across the country. But have Hackensack and Teaneck readers seen any stories about the growing Muslim populations in their towns? Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado was alerted about the opening of an Islamic cultural center (and possibly, a mosque) off Hudson Street in Hackensack a few years ago, but she simply ignored it.

On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, a reporter did a feature about Teaneck's new Muslim mayor and its Jewish deputy mayor, in a town with a large number of African-American and Orthodox Jewish residents. Sure, there was coverage of the mayor's selection by Teaneck reporter Joseph Ax, but it was handled routinely. 

Today's front page is dominated by a photo of Muslims in a Paterson mosque observing the start of Ramadan, but the story is crammed into L-3, in a Local section without any Hackensack or Teaneck municipal news. Greenwood Lake boaters get better coverage than Hackensack.

Giovanna Fabiano, the Englewood reporter, has two stories (L-1 and L-2) -- both from council meetings she covered Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

But when Englewood restaurateur Michel Bittan made headlines worldwide for having a relationship with one of those North Jersey-based Russian spies, Fabiano couldn't even get a comment from him and didn't pursue leads on his property holdings and influence in Englewood's struggling business district. 

Page L-3 also carries a column by Mike Kelly, who rehashes Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa's bid for the police union to pay his legal fees. He pushes around hundreds of words to recap Alvarado's stories, but is there anything new here? Why did this mouse of a journalist write this column, to fill space?

It has long been obvious to everyone except Scandale and Sykes that Kelly is completely useless as a columnist, but who did Scandale fire? It was Lawrence Aaron, the paper's only black columnist. Kelly's assignment editor appears to do only a spell check.

After Wednesday's Page 1 lead for Passaic County Sheriff Jerry "Inspector Clouseau" Speziale's unexpected departure for a much higher-paying police post -- two stories and a column -- an editorial today (A-18) puts in perspective the lousy job he has been doing running the office, and urges freeholders to take action. What a mixed message.

Maxell Corp. of America moved employees into the same Garret Mountain office complex in Woodland Park where North Jersey Media Group and its two daily newspapers have their headquarters. But is that any reason to run a story about Maxell across the top of L-9 today?

Better Living's Mike Kerwick apparently couldn't find any first-place barbecue competition winners, so the section cover today has a story on three also-rans from Bergen County who have won "trophies." 

Ex-Food Editor Bill Pitcher defended


Don't miss the comments on Monday's post, Bill Pitcher gets down with readers, including an anonymous one from someone who appears to be an insider. He or she also has some disquieting words about NJMG's employee-retirement fund.


Just click on the word "comments" at the end of that post.