Color The Record white

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Take a look at the faces that appear today in the main news and Local news sections of The Record of Woodland Park. They are overwhelmingly white, reflecting the racial makeup of the editors and news staff. (To find black and Hispanic faces, you have to turn to Better Living and Sports.)

Read the coverage of  the snowstorm, starting on Page 1, and most of the people quoted are white. Road Warrior John Cichowski interviews well-to-do whites like himself who worked from home, but no one who doesn't own a car and had to walk or rely on those creaking local buses the pompous reporter has refused to write about. (That homeless guy he has been writing about forever doesn't count.)  

Are we to believe no black kids built snowmen?

In fact, there is little in the coverage by nearly 40 news staffers and photographers about NJ Transit bus and train service.

If the past is any guide, tomorrow, in coverage of the clean-up, you likely won't find anything about pedestrians who have to walk in the street because homeowners and merchants haven't shoveled their walks, or bus riders who have to wait in the street or climb dangerous snowbanks in front of their uncleared bus stops.

The Record, reporters like Cichowski and the inept assignment editors seem to care more about the plight of people like themselves when covering a storm, while they ignore everyone who doesn't belong to the paper's "demographic." Or maybe that's the word that has come down from the wealthy Borg family's North Jersey Media Group.

Early in his tenure, Editor Frank Scandale had to order municipal reporters to go out at least once a month and  come back with a story about minorities. I guess that initiative was abandoned long ago. Of course, he also got rid of the paper's only Hispanic and only black columnists.

Even the two, expanded obituaries of prominent local folks, on L-6, are of of a white physicist and a white restaurant owner, which is coincidence, I'm sure.

There is no development, education or municipal news from Hackensack in today's paper, or from Englewood and Teaneck, the three most highly diversified towns in Bergen County.

On Page 1, the main photo is of a lone pedestrian crossing a deserted Main Street in Hackensack. It appears under the main headline: "Jersey takes a snow day." I hate the dismissive "Jersey" for "New Jersey." Do you ever see "York" in a headline? "We take a snow day" would have been far better.

Road Warrior, please take a hike

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Am I the only one wondering why The Record columnist who is supposed to be writing about the woes of commuters --in cars, buses and trains -- continues to waste his time, as he does today on the front of the Local section, on the families who live on a private road in Hawthorne or the Upper Saddle River neighbors plagued by drivers speeding toward their salvation?

Since John Cichowski took over the Road Warrior column at the end of 2003, he has done everything in his power to avoid writing about the sorry state of some of the buses and trains operated by NJ Transit, and the despicable treatment of some bus riders who must take decades-old contraptions on several local routes, including the Nos. 780, 770 and 756. What's his excuse? What does Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, the head of the assignment desk, have to say?

This is dereliction of duty, especially when the paper's other transportation reporters -- Tom Davis and Karen Rouse -- are just as lazy as Cichowski. They also refuse to ride those unsightly buses -- many of which are used by minorities who can't afford cars -- or even write about some new buses that have appeared on local routes.

It's time for Cichowski to get off his ass and return to reporting -- back out in the streets. Perhaps that will give him a sense of what it is like for the rest of us if we choose to take mass transit. It's also time for Davis and Rouse to get off their asses and act like journalists again.

Not much to read today

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There's certainly nothing special about The Record of Woodland Park on this Sunday, especially how North Jersey gets short shrift in coverage of the snowstorm provided by the Star-Ledger. This saves the paper money, but cheats readers.

The "highlight" of the Local section is a pissing match between outgoing Englewood Mayor Michael Wildes and the city attorney on the legality of a Wildes-appointed commission. The real story is that many city residents regret voting for this relentless self-promoter -- whose middle name is "Pay to Play" -- and can't wait for him to leave office at the end of the year. Is reporter Giovanna Fabiano working on that?

Road Warrior John Cichowski has yet another column on the condition of North Jersey roads, while stubbornly refusing to get off his duff and ride one of the contraptions that NJ Transit is passing off as a local bus. His many columns about drivers and his repeated refusal in the last six years to give a voice to bus riders -- largely blacks and Hispanics who can't afford cars -- is tantamount to racism.

You won't find any Hackensack news in the former Hackensack daily today.

But you shouldn't miss the column on this year's hits and misses by Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung. In the second paragraph, this naive reporter repeats El Sol de Cuba's ridiculous assertion that its founding owner conceived many of the original recipes "in a Cuban prison and labor camp" during the Revolution. How likely is it that anything resembling food was served to prisoners, many of whom were excecuted?

Where are the people?

Cover of The Talk of the Town

Day after day, the voices of residents are missing from The Record of Woodland Park. The paper is one of the few in recent decades that never adopted a time-tested journalistic form, used by other papers big and small, called "The Talk of the Town."

Sure, you'll see gadflies quoted or residents at a protest or public hearing on a quality-of-life issue that some crummy town has allowed to fester for decades, such as the closed Pompton Lakes munitions plant all over the front page yesterday. But where are the voices of the rest of us?

We read endless stories about infrastructure, such as the road repair "expose" on Page 1 today, while the voices of the poor schmucks who have to ride NJ Transit's decrepit local buses are ignored. A school official quits and it leads the Local section or a renovated borough hall is finished and the story is lavish and illustrated (both on L-1 today). But what are the people in the coffee shop saying?

Look at the three Teaneck stories that ran today and yesterday. A public hearing finally is being held on a synagogue that has held services for about two years. Two years? The other stories, which ran today, are about insurance against lawsuits and a grant to hire firefighters -- more in the mind-numbing stream of bureaucratic coverage.

If every new municipal reporter at The Record did a "Talk of the Town" -- interviewing residents at the Starbucks, supermarket and elsewhere -- they would get an instant education. They'd learn about quality of life issues and something about how well or how poorly their town is being run. It would be useful for these columns to appear at least once a year for each town. Of course, that's a lot harder than strolling over to the fax machine in the Woodland Park newsroom to fetch a press release.

I wonder what residents of Englewood have to say about the nightmarish downtown traffic -- aggravated by police foot-dragging on installing turn lanes at congested intersections. I wonder what the residents who live across the street from an open-air police firing range have to say about hearing gunshots and shotgun blasts as early as 8 a.m.?

A Record reporter named Dena Yellin did a round-up of police firing ranges some time ago, but omitted the Englewood range. This is the kind of "regional" story that has largely replaced coverage of individual towns.

Christina Joseph, who assigned the story to her, sent it along to the news copy desk without noticing the omission, even though Joseph had covered Englewood as a reporter before she was promoted. The anonymous news copy editor apparently knew nothing about  Englewood, so the story ran as is -- another slap in the face to people who live there. Isn't that pathetic? Especially from a paper that once prided itself on local coverage.

If you are going to do a "Talk of the Town," it will require good, old-fashioned legwork. For a reporter, there is no substitute for going and seeing for yourself. Reject the advice of your lazy, incompetent editor to do stories by phone.

I'm sure residents of the high-rises in Hackensack have a lot to say about the business jets screaming overhead on the way to Teterboro Airport. Some are so frightened by how close these fat cats' planes come, they don't use their terraces in good weather. Would a higher approach altitude for these jets give high-rise dwellers and their neighbors relief from the noise? Does Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado care? Does her editor care?  Does The Record care?