'Is that town in our circulation area'?

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The Record's assignment desk is the laziest east of the Appalachian Mountains.

"Hey, Kibret, where are you going, Lincoln Park?" head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes said over the phone to Kibret Markos, The Record's reporter at state Superior Court in Hackensack.


"No. Palisades Park," the reporter said. "A Korean kid is going on trial for punching another kid in the school cafeteria."


"Oh, that's where all those Koreans live," the editor said. "Have you ever tried any of their spicy food? It's just awful. I just choke on all that red pepper.


"Anyway, is that town in our circulation area? Do we even cover Palisades Park?"


No. The Woodland Park daily doesn't really cover Pal Park, and if you search northjersey.com, you'll come up with scattered stories and others with the word "park" or "Park" in them that have nothing to do with the Bergen town.


Gag order


It's curious that Markos' detailed Page 1 stories Thursday and today don't tell readers whether the boy Dong Sung An was accused of punching is also Korean or from another ethnic group.


The reporter claims "the case renewed debate" over police charging students, rather than allowing schools to handle the discipline.


But if the other student is not Korean, it could very well be another example of town officials treating An and other Koreans differently.


The growth of the Korean community in Palisades Park has long been marked by conflict. Town officials once ordered 24-hour Korean restaurants to close, but allowed a diner near police headquarters to stay open around the clock.


I haven't seen anything in the paper about the recent downturn in the fortunes of Broad Avenue, which is dominated by Korean-owned businesses.


It's one reason the assignment desk has earned a reputation of being the laziest operation east of the Appalachian Mountains.


Liz Houlton's news copy desk did another lousy job with the headlines today, especially with the sub-headline: "Student avoids harsh sentence in cafeteria fight."


The judge declined to put An on probation or order him to perform community service. Neither are "harsh" and neither could even be considered a "sentence."


Prison bitch


Does anybody outside Editor Francis Scandale and Staff Writer John Brennan care that imprisoned killer Jayson Williams is going from one prison to another (A-1)? Is this really front-page news?


The story says Williams has lost weight, but not whether he's become someone's prison bitch -- just as Scandale has become Brennan's newsroom bitch.


Brennan continues to handle the story like a public relations man trying to repair the failed athlete's image -- carefully omitting Williams killed a limo driver after a night of drinking.


Toll on readers


Staff Writer Shawn Boburg continues to publish justification for the Port Authority's outrageous toll-and-fare hike plan (A-3), but hasn't followed up on Governor Christie's claim the agency is mismanaged.


Two other views of the toll-and-fare proposal are on A-20 -- where cartoonist Margulies says Christie did a great job acting surprised -- and on the front of Local -- where Road Warrior John Cichowski blows off commuters by noting they're "probably plenty worried about forking over a few more bucks."



The columnist clearly isn't worried -- he never leaves the office to cover news or do reporting for his columns, but merely pores over reports, surveys, statistics and data, as he does for today's piece.


Another story on the front of Sykes' Local section -- on flooding at the North Bergen headquarters of The Vitamin Shoppe -- reminds me of all the flooding at The Record's old headquarters in Hackensack, and how the company never did anything about it (L-1).

Francis and Momma bury the real news

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Editor Francis "Castrato" Scandale led the paper Friday with the perjury indictment of ex-athlete Roger Clemens, so why did he bury the DWI guilty plea of former athlete Jayson Williams, who is in prison for killing his limo driver after a night of drinking (A-4)? Now, The Record of Woodland Park's front page has no real news today.

Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hen" Sykes, also known as "Momma," have apparently agreed to cover only the more affluent towns in North Jersey -- turning their backs on minority communities such as Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood -- so it makes sense for them to bury a story on the growth of local news blogs that go after those same advertising dollars (A-8), and treat it as a business story.

Scandale, whose wife is Cuban, continues to assign Cuba stories to a reporter who is a Cuban exile and whose anti-Castro sentiments are well-known (A-2). He's hen-pecked, not objective.

The Local news section today has no Hackensack news, which isn't news. That's the way it is most days.

Other sections continue to lose local flavor. The Better Living editors didn't bother trying to locate any community gardens in North Jersey; they just ran a wire service story today that mentions Houston, Cleveland and San Francisco.

The spoiled Borg siblings have done so much to hurt Hackensack and its Main Street businesses, isn't it time for them to give back a little by establishing a community garden at the old headquarters on River Street? 

After all, former Publisher Malcolm A. Borg has insisted on maintaining a Hackensack "presence" for The Record and North Jersey Media Group. Hope the Old Man is enjoying his summer as much as possible in view of how his greedy son has pushed him aside so totally.

Was it Publisher Stephen A. Borg's idea to put a story on slow cellphone chip production on Page 1 today, in a pitch to cellphone addicts such as himself? He kept his phone glued to his ear as he left the Hackensack newsroom so he wouldn't have to talk to any of the peons he was planning to get rid of.

  (Photo: A community garden.)

Boxing in reporter John Brennan

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The long-delayed sentencing of former Nets star Jayson Williams is all over the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today: Eight years of "partying all the time" and being "treated like a king" since the 2002 killing of his limo driver. Persistent problems with alcohol and guns. Up to five years in prison for the shooting and attempted cover-up.

All this under the byline of Staff Writer John Brennan, who had to give up his public relations effort for Williams and could no longer peddle half-truths for the ex-athlete he once covered as as sports reporter. He could no longer omit a crucial fact as he had in several past stories: The shooting occurred after a night of drinking.

This time, Brennan was boxed in -- forced to report what was said in court by the prosecutor and the dead limo driver's distraught sister. But the reporter didn't give up until today, deliberately or inadvertently reporting incorrectly just yesterday that the potential sentence was 18 months, not up to five years. (Photo: Somerset County Courthouse.)



In the big Page 1 photo, Williams towers over his attorneys and sheriff's officers, but the look of consternation on his face as he was bring handcuffed is priceless. He seems to get it -- finally. I wonder if Brennan will ever get it.

Rehabilitation of Paterson

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Do you recall how The Record once devoted hundreds of hours of staff time and tens of thousands of dollars in salaries to portray Paterson as North Jersey's biggest drug bazaar, which lured many Bergen County suburbanites to ruin? Then, more recently, the paper ran another sensational series on prostitution in Silk City.

Well, that's all in the past (but you'll notice how reporters Mike Kelly and John Brennan have been prostituting themselves with their "public relations" coverage of a cop-turned-criminal and a tipsy athlete-turned-killer, respectively).

For the second day in a row, Paterson has been put in a flattering light on Page 1, the latest in a series of positive stories since North Jersey Media Group and its flagship daily moved their headquarters last year to Woodland Park (formerly West Paterson).

I haven't been counting column inches or stories, but it may be fair to say Paterson has received more news coverage than Hackensack, where the paper was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years before the greedy Borg family hatched a plan to sell its landmark River Street building.

Someone should tell Brennan and the news copy editor who read his story that killer Jayson Williams won't "accept" an 18- month prison sentence today, as if it is an invitation to a tea party. The reporter again omits in his Page A-6 story that Williams killed his limo driver after a night of drinking, but found room to tell readers the square footage of the ex-athlete's home (27,000 square feet -- eat your heart out, Stephen A. Borg, you have live in a mere 8,500 square feet).

On A-8 today, the editorial on recycling incentives in Paterson includes the financial arrangements with a private company the reporter omitted from her front-page story yesterday.

On the front of Local for a change, an obituary about an interesting North Jerseyan appears in place of the drivel from Kelly and fellow Columnist John Cichowski.

I'm glad Vietnamese Chef K.T. Tran is getting more recognition for the traditional soup called pho she has been serving at Saigon R. in Englewood for close to a decade, but why does Better Living waste space on a recipe that calls for 10 pounds of beef bones among its 20 or so ingredients? Do the lazy editors think any reader is going to tackle this at home?

More pandering to sports fans

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You can understand why approval of a medical marijuana bill dominates the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today, but why is former sports reporter John Brennan given Page 1 play for another, wildly sympathetic portrait of ex-Nets basketball player Jayson Williams?

Brennan -- who would make a good P.R. man for Williams -- again goes out of his way to hide the man's problems with alcohol, omitting any mention of the night of drinking in 2002 that preceded the fatal shooting of his driver, whose life was cut short at 55. I can't wait until Williams is in prison for his stupidity in showing off his loaded shotgun to friends.

The Williams story on A-1 forces the lazy, incompetent editors to give short shrift to passage of a land-use bill that is being portrayed by environmentalists as a giveaway to developers, shoving it inside to Page A-4.

Don't look for any municipal, education or developement news of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood or many other Bergen County towns in the Local section of the former Hackensack daily. But what is increasingly passing for local news takes up all of L-3 -- court, crime, accident and fire news -- and more of it appears on L-1 and L-2. You have to wonder what Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, the editor who heads the local assignement desk, is doing to earn her inflated salary.

But Hackensack residents, who live under the noisy flight paths of both Teterboro and Newark airports, and people in other towns inadvertently get good news in the Business section. Word that Teterboro flights and employment are falling mean less noise and a slightly better quality of life for tens of thousands of us. It's an issue the former Bergen Record and its reporters long have ignored. (Malcolm A. Borg, the bored chairman of North Jersey Media Group, was a powerful, vocal  advocate for an air museum at Teterboro in the mid-1980s. Now, all he and his children -- Publisher Stephen A. Borg and General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg -- do is count their money after downsizing The Record and cutting retiree medical benefits.)

I'm sure I speak for many who would like to see Teterboro serve only as a sales, training and maintenance hub, with virtually all flights shifted to other airports. After all, this is not essential aviation, but merely business executives, actors and hip-hop stars whose pampered behinds are transported in private jets. Maybe the rest of us would get more sleep.