What a crappy edition

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When was the last time The Record failed to publish a weekly restaurant review, as it did today? The centerfold of Better Living looks positively weird after nearly three years of mouth-watering food photography. 

I guess frugal Features Director Barbara Jaeger was economizing or her planning was way off, with one food editor leaving and a new one taking over this week.

Look at all the Page 1 space Editor Francis "Frank The Castrato" Scandale devotes to the niche horse-racing audience, while relegating the potential loss of New Jersey Network and the actual loss of farmland to Pages A-3 and A-6, respectively.

The lead A-1 story on workers' growing health-insurance burden isn't news, especially to employees of the Borgs' North Jersey Media Group, where health benefits began to erode a dozen or more years ago. Curiously, the story quotes only business groups, with no input from employee unions whatsoever.

Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin sounds like a blithering idiot today, with his comparison of the Governor Christie-Bret Schundler brouhaha to actor Mel Gibson's physical and verbal abuse of Oksana Grigorieva (A-19). 

I guess we should have expected dumbing down of the opinion pages from this former Herald News staffer.


Except for the Road Warrior column on traffic alerts, the entire front of the Local news section today is devoted to court stories, with the most interesting one pushed down to the bottom of the page in favor of tabloid news. A fourth court story appears on L-2.


Meanwhile, you won't find any news from Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck or many other towns, big and small.


The L-1 story about natty Hugh Johnson of Closter carries a headline identifying him as a gadfly, but nowhere in the text does that word appear, nor is there any description of his gadfly activities. This is another example of the decline of news copy editing at the paper that seems to be irreversible.

A quarter of Page L-6 is given to a breathless account of the capture of a 4-foot alligator in Wayne.


Publisher Stephen A. Borg probably is spending the Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons or down the shore, but he can rest assured that in his absence, Scandale and head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Mother Hens" Sykes are doing a great job for readers.


However, he might want to check on the health of the new food editor he hand picked. Is Susan Sherrill on a hunger strike? Is that why Better Living failed to deliver a restaurant review today? 

What about Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung, who returned from a six-month maternity leave about 10 days ago? In view of her appetite, it's a puzzle why her review won't appear until next Friday. Maybe no one could get her to put down her dessert fork.

(Photo: Mel Gibson mugshot from his 2006 DUI arrest.)

Is there a message in this front page?

Image by Terje S. Skjerdal via Flickr

Teachers protest in Teaneck over state aid cuts and pension changes. A man pleads not guilty in the death of his wife, a Bergenfield teacher (though that phrase never appears in the story). And the executive director of a preschool and child-care agency for Paterson children gets a $300,000 compensation package. That's the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today.

Inside, though, an editorial on Page A-20 finally focuses on home rule as the real reason our property taxes are so high, and urges Governor Christie to devote some of his attention to patronage jobs and the system's incredibly expensive duplication: For example, we have 70 police chiefs in Bergen County alone, and more than 70 school superintendents. 

Of course, this corrupt system is decades old, but The Record's all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful editors have done little so far to expose it or call for its dismantling. Maybe, they are defending "neighborhood schools" -- code for the predominately white education system outside of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood, Paterson and Passaic city.

Staff Writer Jean Rimbach led an investigation of private but publicly funded preschools about five years ago and wrote a three-part series exposing inflated salaries and other wasteful spending -- as detailed in today's front-page story about Ron Williams and the B.J. Wilkerson Memorial Childhood Development Center. I guess her series, under the guidance of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, amounted to little more than a loud, journalistic fart -- and brought no reform.


The same can be said about another Sykes-inspired, Rimbach-led probe -- this one focused on a single man, Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. 

This was another turd Sykes and Rimbach tried to polish -- as was evident from the single, weak story on the Local front last Dec. 16. Yet, this so-called investigation took nearly three years and squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries for Rimbach and other reporters, including Monsy Alvarado and Shawn Boburg. 

Could that money have prevented staff layoffs?

Now, Sykes apparently has the hapless Alvarado investigating Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa, a former assemblyman, forcing the reporter to ignore any other news about River City, where The Record was founded in 1895.

Of course, none of this lousy journalism could go on without a total lack of interest in the newsroom shown in the last few years by Publisher Stephen A. Borg and his big sister, Vice President and General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg. These sophisticated siblings apparently are more interested in the Englewood wine bar in which they've invested.


In Better Living today, vegetarians or families who have taken a meatless pledge shouldn't bother reading the review of Soram, a Korean restaurant in Norwood with a limited menu. 

In fact, Restaurant Reviewer Bill Pitcher apparently ate only one dish without beef or pork. The meat-obsessed Pitcher also mistakenly calls that dish -- bibimbap -- "the vegetarian standby on most Korean menus" (the dish is almost always topped with ground meat, vegetables and an egg -- cooked or raw).  He doesn't even mention whether the restaurant serves complimentary, non-meat side dishes such as kimchi, bean sprouts and fish.

The appearance of several house ads in the food pages today tells you Pitcher, the food editor, seems to be running out of news. What's the explanation for a restaurant health inspection list that includes only 12 of the 90 or so towns in the former Hackensack daily's circulation area? (Photo: Reading the paper in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.)

I'll have the wahoo every time

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In Friday's restaurant review, Elisa Ung of The Record says the owner knows what will sell to his "primarily senior citizen clientele ... fish selections like swordfish and grouper, not something like wahoo."

Wahoo? I had never heard of it and had never seen it listed on a North Jersey menu, so I did some Internet research. I learned it is an "eco-sustainable alternative to swordfish," which is a fish so high in mercury that young women and children are warned not to consume it. I'm a senior and would order wahoo every time to avoid  mercury and certainly would patronize a restaurant that served it over one that served swordfish. Learn more about wahoo at this Web site:

www.tobagowild.com

Returning to the restaurant's name, Ung reports it is named for the owner's daughter, Davia, and son John wanted "no part of the name." Imagine if he did. It could be called Davohn, Daviohn, Javia, Javian, Johnia, Jia, Davia-John or John-Davia. See post, "The Record of Woodland Park, 10/30/2009."

http://doyoureallyknowwhatyoureeating.blogspot.com/