At least readers have the recycling bin

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The Record goofed big time on the "expected" site of Whitney Houston's funeral in Newark.

Returning from a week in California, I climbed into a limo at John F. Kennedy International Airport at close to midnight on Monday and stared at the headline and big color photo on the front page of The Record, which the driver had placed on the back seat.


I was exhausted from the long flight, and it was enough to put me instantly to sleep.


A near-empty Bergen County 911 dispatching center made a terrible photo for the paper's premier page, and the story about the slow process of centralizing emergency response wasn't much better.


Loose change


I guess not much has changed at the Woodland Park daily, despite the arrival of a veteran New York Times editor to run the newsroom last month. 


As I separated the advertising and Sports sections from news and features, I consoled myself that at least I could recycle all this wasted newsprint.


The only real news on the front page today is rising gasoline prices, but that story is just catching up to the hikes North Jersey drivers have seen in the past couple of weeks.


In San Francisco, a station on Ocean Avenue in the Ingleside neighborhood raised a gallon of regular by 9 cents overnight, followed by a 6-cent increase the next day, bringing the price to $4.05. 


Today, at my Shell station on Cedar Lane in Teaneck, $3.59 a gallon for regular seems like a bargain. 


What will Editor Marty Gottlieb do when gasoline sails over $4 a gallon in North Jersey -- devote the entire front page to the news?


Christie apologist


Also on Page 1 today is another limp-weiner political column from Staff Writer Charles Stiles, who waits until the continuation page to explain that Governor Christie's bullshit plan to cut income taxes will mean jack to the middle class.


Stiles also seems to conveniently forget that Christie was elected on a platform that promised to cut property -- not income -- taxes.


In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, I see more Northvale, Fort Lee and Bogota news.


On L-3, the Hackensack reporter, Stephanie Akin, writes about a film festival sponsored by an African-American civics club. 


In Better Living, a story on the beginning of Lent was assigned to a reporter who apparently knows nothing about the wonders of wild-caught seafood, judging from how hard she pushes McDonald's crappy Filet-O-Fish (F-1). 

Monday's paper


I don't see any Hackensack news in Monday's newspaper. I haven't looked over all of the papers delivered since Feb. 13, so don't know whether other Hackensack stories have run recently.


Columnist Mike Kelly must have run out of ideas, devoting an entire column to a Haworth teen who collected nearly $1,000 for cancer research (L-1).


Sunday's paper


Most of Sunday's front page was devoted to the funeral service for Whitney Houston at New Hope Baptist Church in Newark under the headline:

Houston comes home

Unfortunately, that headline duplicated a Page 1 headline that ran only five days before over what turned out to be an embarrassing error -- a story that reported the Prudential Center was expected to be the site of the funeral.

Whitney

comes home

for funeral

That headline last Tuesday from Editor Liz Houlton's dysfunctional news copy desk doesn't even tell the story, which apparently was pulled out of thin air by Staff Writer John Brennan, who beats the sports-business beat to death. 


Brennan cited "sources familiar with the arrangements" in reporting the Prudential Center had been chosen for the funeral. I guess he has unreliable sources.


The big question is why Gottlieb or any other editor takes Brennan seriously and continues to put his stories on Page 1.

Editors discover abandoned city

WHITNEY HOUSTON (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)
1963-2012

Half of The Record's front page today is covered by the same-old coverage of Camden -- in a rare instance of the paper sending a reporter and photographer to the impoverished city. 


But readers won't find the real story -- why Camden was abandoned by state government and the media decades ago. 


Columnist Mike Kelly plays crack houses, the flight of industry, crime, poverty and unemployment like violins -- but hasn't all of this been reported many times before (A-1 and A-6)? 


And doesn't North Jersey have its own Camden in Paterson? Why just cover breaking news there? Why not dig under the surface for why Paterson is allowed to fail.


Recall all the stories portraying Paterson as a center of drugs and prostitution that ran when Francis "Frank" Scandale was editor and head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes was his bitch.


It's not surprising Kelly doesn't have the balls to explore why Camden's minority residents have been so totally rejected by society. 


Recall his repugnance at the influx of gay couples who were reviving Asbury Park when he was sent there with a photographer in 2000. He never mentioned the renewal in his extensive report.


Resort's obituary


Instead, his obituary for Asbury Park covered three newspaper pages in The Sunday Record on Aug. 6, 2000.


On the same exact day, an upbeat cover story in The New York Times' New Jersey section reported that urban homosexual men and women were leading the way in reviving the run-down resort, drawn by affordable, stylish homes and gay clubs. 


One photo showed two women on the beach with their arms around each other.

The two stories were like night and day, with Kelly reporting conditions that had existed for a decade or more, and The Times breaking the story of the resort's turnaround.


Total letdown

Today's Sunday edition of The Record is a total letdown, including another repetitive Local section from Sykes. 

After reading about the heart-breaking loss of singer Whitney Houston at only 48 (A-1), nothing else seems interesting or compelling, and the news and Better Living columnists sound stale.

It's lucky The Record had The Star-Ledger's excellent obituary of Houston to run on the front page -- displacing some of the briefs in the off-lead position -- because it's unlikely any of the weekend editors on duty Saturday night were up to whipping together such a piece.

Taking a break

Eye on The Record will return next week.

I'll be reading and publishing comments until then, and would like to hear first impressions of Editor Marty Gottlieb, who came on board three weeks ago.