Future of Gannett journalism: 5 times more ads than news

NJ Transit buses in the exclusive lane to the Lincoln Tunnel are driven against the flow of westbound traffic during the morning commute. The Port Authority has ignored calls for a second XBL, as the lane is called, and never explained why exclusive bus lanes don't operate in the evening, too.

For decades, this portion of Route 495 to the Lincoln Tunnel has been called the helix. On Wednesday, The Record's so-called commuting columnist labeled it a "bridge," and raised an alarm about a rehabilitation project that won't start until late next year at the earliest.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I might actually try reading the Thanksgiving Day edition of The Record now that I've caught my breath after wrestling with what felt like 5 pounds of advertising inserts.

I quickly bundled them up for recycling, along with Sports, leaving me with four news and feature sections, containing pages that appear to carry more advertising and less news than before Gannett redesigned the print edition.

Stephen A. Borg, the former publisher, was no slouch when it came to advertising and marketing, and he even created a North Jersey Media Group unit that staged food-truck and other events.

Those events were promoted in the paper and covered by the news staff.

With the sale of NJMG to Gannett for a reported $40 million in July, the Borgs now call themselves Fourth Edition Inc., and work out of their old offices in Woodland Park.

Today's paper

It's front-page news when President-elect Donald J. Trump doesn't appoint another middle-aged white man or white supremacist to his Cabinet (1A).

Today's A-section has news on 4A, 8A and 9A that would normally appear in Local.

Local news?

Since Gannett let go more than 200 NJMG employees, reporters and editors for daily and weekly papers now work out of the same newsroom.

That means readers of the local-news section have been seeing many unfamiliar bylines, which belong to reporters from the weeklies.

Generally, they are younger and less experienced, and make a lot less money than reporters for The Record and Herald News.

Wednesday's paper

Staff Writer Christopher Maag, who covered NJ Transit and the city of Hackensack for The Record, had a Page 1 byline on Wednesday that identified him as "columnist."

No thumbnail photo of Maag appeared, as with The Record's other columnist. 

His story on "one family's journey from Syria to Paterson" is a tearjerker, especially if you've been following the horrific news from Aleppo and other towns that are being destroyed during the civil war.

The focus was on Ghussoon Zouabi, 39, who recalls the food shortages in Syria and who has been cooking non-stop since she arrived in South Paterson for her family, for the homeless and for others.

"When we got to my parents house [in Paterson], the kids opened the fridge and pulled all the food out and ate it. I sat on the floor and cried."

Zouabi arrived in the United States in March 2013. 

Last year, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, Governor Christie called for a ban on all Syrian immigrants to New Jersey, including children, but it has been widely ignored.

Route 495

Staff Writer John Cichowski appears to be the only columnist who continues to use a dated thumbnail photo, which is probably a decade old.

On Wednesday's Local front, his Road Warrior column quotes commuters who use Route 495 to the Lincoln Tunnel.

But Cichowski isn't concerned about congestion in the exclusive bus lane, the lack of rush-hour seats on NJ Transit buses or how Route 495 was closed for an hour in each direction when Trump left Manhattan for his New Jersey golf club last week.

Instead, the addled reporter looks more than a year ahead to the start of a major rehabilitation of the Route 495 helix, which he refers to as a "bridge" (1L).

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

 

Finally, some ink for the have-nots

Few white students attended Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood before it added the Academies program. Englewood Cliffs sued to remove its students years earlier.

Not long after he pushed his father aside in June 2006, Publisher Stephen A. Borg hired a non-profit reporter to find out whether the pennies the young millionaire was donating to charity were being wasted.

Borg was born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- not with a social conscience -- so it's no surprise The Record hasn't paid too much attention to the victims of the recession, which saw the high-living publisher move into a $3.65 million mansion. 

Today, Editor Marty Gottlieb and that non-profit reporter, Harvy Lipman, present a hard-hitting package of stories and photos under a banner headline on Page 1, documenting that the number of North Jersey residents "falling into poverty or struggling to keep their heads above water continues to grow."

Scandalous editor

What is remarkable about the stories, photos and graphics filled with startling statistics is how little attention the long-term unemployed and other recession victims received from Gottlieb's insensitive predecessor as editor, Francis "Frank" Scandale, who was fired last October after 11 years in the job. 

The photographs by Staff Photographer Mitsu Yasukawa are moving.

But some of the charts raise questions about why residents of Alpine, Saddle River and other wealthy communities are receiving food stamps (A-9).

The danger of such comprehensive coverage is that readers may start to wonder why head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, have failed to report all of this before.

Granny power

That's also the case with Mike Kelly's A-1 column on Lynne Hurwitz, the Democratic power broker behind the decades-long reign of the Zisa family in Hackensack.

Kelly tries to make up for the paper's lack of attention by bombarding readers with almost everything they don't really want to know about Hurwitz except how she lost her virginity.

More idiocy

On Sykes Local front, another Road Warrior column on Infuriating Driving Issues of the Day only serves to remind readers the acronym -- IDIOD -- sounds surprisingly close to IDIOT, a reference to the moron who writes this drivel, John Cichowski.

Sykes and Sforza have been sitting on their asses for so many years, they don't know enough to tell Cichowski to write more about Infuriating Mass-Transit Issues of the Day and less about drivers, in a region that is hopelessly choked with traffic.

White flight

The L-1 story on school districts enrolling outsiders reports Englewood school officials were under a state mandate "to diversify" Dwight Morrow High School.

But the truth is the mandate was "to desegregate" a high school that had few white students.

If you doubt Sykes and Sforza can't find any municipal news to report, look at L-3 today -- a stupid political column and three feel-good stories.

Why is a "world issues" literature program at Tenafly High School -- out of all the other schools in North Jersey -- worthy of a long story in the local-news section (L-3)?

Bottom feeder

In his column on the Business front today and in his monthly Marketbasket survey of supermarket prices, Staff Writer Kevin DeMarrais continues to be in denial about the tens of thousands of shopper who buy organic food (B-1).

You won't find The Corner Table column in Better Living today, because Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung is on vacation.

No loss. Readers need a vacation from her shameless promotion of chefs, wine stewards and restaurant owners. 

Here are two of her vacation tweets:

  

14h Elisa Ung ‏@elisaung

Amazing clam chowder at @splashcafe in Pismo Beach, CA. No wonder the line is out the door http://lockerz.com/s/219559367

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11:28 PM - 23 Jun 12 via Echofon · Details

14h Elisa Ung ‏@elisaung

Amused to see these on the dining room table at Hearst Castle http://lockerz.com/s/219558581

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Want to read more? Here is the link:  

Elisa Ung on Twitter

Readers are the ones who need protection

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The Record has long ignored safety problems in Ford police cruisers.

Don't bother trying to climb into the brain of Editor Francis Scandale: It's the size of a pea.


Don't bother trying to understand why he loves bonding with other males over sports or why he favors slapping fellow editors on the ass to signal a job well-done.


With the government on the brink of default and readers still trying to make some sense of the slaughter in Norway, Scandale thinks the most important story of the day for The Record of Woodland Park is the end of a football lockout.


Did he order the inane headline at the top of Page 1 today, seemingly an appeal to like-minded readers?

Strap on your helmets

What was the news copy desk thinking? Are readers literally going to go looking for a football helmet? Do even hardened fans wear helmets in front of the TV?


Maybe readers are being told to put on helmets as protection from Scandale, who continues to bombard them with distracting nonsense.


Or perhaps Scandale gives prominence to this story as recognition of how NFL owners are greedily grabbing for more money -- an issue he's familiar with since fellow jock Stephen A. Borg took over as publisher five years ago.


Ford gets a pass


The A-1 story on turnpike lawsuit settlements at the bottom of the page inadvertently highlights safety problems with the Ford Crown Victoria -- used by police departments across North Jersey -- a story the paper has avoided for years.


Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors went out of control at high speeds, killing  Teaneck and Paramus officers. Twelve other officers were killed between 1983 and 2002 when cruisers were rear-ended and caught fire, according to CNN.


Today's A-1 story in The Record reports a 19-year-old fashion model was trapped and burned to death in 2006 after her 2003 Ford Crown Victoria taxi stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, and was rear-ended by another vehicle traveling 45 mph to 50 mph.


Running in place


Scandale thought more of the football story than two pieces on A-3 today about Governor Christie's ambitions for national office, including his attempts to hide a meeting last year with the head of the conservative Fox News channel.


Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes made sure she made room in Local for the burglary of eight unlocked cars in Tenafly, where Borg lives (L-3).


Sun stroke


Road Warrior Columnist John Cichowski must have been suffering from heat stroke when he wrote his Sunday L-1 column on leaving pets in cars during the heat wave.


What happened to his mission of writing about commuting problems?


The lead article in Local on Sunday -- how politics affect solar-power projects -- was well-researched, but the reporter erred on the location of Bergen County's major installations, as an A-2 correction notes today.


An editorial on O-2 Sunday praises first lady Michelle Obama's program to attack childhood obesity, but is strangely silent on what New Jersey first lady Mary Pat Christie is doing about the problem here.


Unfortunately, Staff Writer Scott Fallon's cover story in Travel on Sunday -- "36 Hours in Washington, D.C." -- adopts a format The New York Times has used for many, many years, and smacks of shameless copying.

Slanting the news to please a wealthy publisher

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The Record's story on the Wal-Mart sex-bias case reads the minds of U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Did State House Bureau staffer John Reitmeyer cover the same legislative hearing on Governor Christie's new budget as other reporters?

One news outlet quoted state Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff as saying Christie won't sign a budget that contains a tax surcharge on millionaires.

But you have to plow through Reitmeyer's Page 1 piece in The Record today and turn to the jump page (A-8) before he even mentions such a tax, and he does so only in paraphrasing one of the Democrat lawmakers who have been battling the governor.

Selling out to Wal-Mart

I watched two major TV news reports Tuesday night on the sex-bias suit against Wal-Mart, a Record advertiser -- CBS and PBS -- and neither predicted how the Supreme Court will rule on the plaintiffs' request for class-action status.

But in an A-1 brief , L-1 refer and the major piece on the first Business page (L-7), Editor Francis Scandale chose a slanted Associated Press story sure to please Wal-Mart, other wealthy business owners and his multimillionaire boss, Publisher Stephen A. Borg.

The AP reports the high court "appears ready to block" the lawsuit. Compare that to The New York Times, which reports the court "appeared closely divided" during legal arguments Tuesday.

As if The Record's slant isn't bad enough, the sub-headline is totally inaccurate, saying the justices are expected to "block claim of sex discrimination," even though that issue is not before the court.

Newsroom sex-bias

The spin on the Wal-Mart suit is no surprise coming from Scandale, who, with Features Director Barbara Jaeger, paid $70,000 a year to a new, 30-something male food editor in 2006, thousands of dollars more than the woman he replaced -- a respected food journalist who had 10 times his experience. 

Shouldn't the Port Authority spend $1.8 billion no longer needed for a new rail tunnel on improving mass transit -- not on the road and bridge repairs demanded by Christie (A-3)?

Huh?

Can reporter Karen Rouse, who covers transportation meetings and surveys, balance her checkbook? On A-8 today, she reports turnpike toll collectors "average about $65,000 a year ... but that could be cut to $10 to $12 an hour if the agency goes private." 

An editorial dismissing some residents' aesthetic objections to solar panels on utility poles doesn't mention these are the same people who have buried relatives with cancer and other diseases linked to North Jersey's notorious air pollution (A-20).

On L-6, in head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, Staff Writer Nick Clunn reports on a debate over building apartments next to "a 10,000-mile-long [gas] pipeline" between New York City and the Gulf Coast.

Surrounded by wolves

Don't miss the touching tribute to readers, editors, even his wife at the end of the Your Money's Worth column, which Staff Writer Kevin DeMarrais started 17 years ago March 27 (L-8).

I'll give him a pass -- in view of how he's a lone voice for the consumer among too many reporters and editors at the Borgs' Woodland Park daily who have long ago sold out to Christie, wealthy advertisers and other special interests.