Did you see this in The Record?

 The link below is to a story run by Jerry DeMarco's cliffviewpilot.com on Dec. 24, 2009, but there hasn't been a word in The Record.
 
Police chief apologizes for supporting mobster

Dead time at The Record

I flew through today's thin edition of  The Record of Woodland Park, which is filled with stories I saw on the TV news last night. Most of the front page is devoted to a story under the headline, "Dead time on campus," that was probably in a can for several weeks and hauled out by desperate, incompetent editors with no real news to offer.

As my dear, departed news copy desk colleague, Michael Thaler, used to say frequently, "You can't polish a turd."

The Local section leads with council reorganizations, including the swearing in of an official in Rutherford who looks like he is in his 20s and won by one vote. Good luck, residents. Inside, we learn a politically connected lawyer, Frank Huttle, will be sworn in as mayor of Englewood, replacing Michael Wildes, a relentless self-promoter. Good luck to you, too, Englewood residents. Will Huttle use his office to help integrate the city's elementary and middle schools?

News of Hackensack, Teaneck, Ridgewood and a host of other towns? Try a weekly.

Writing and editing of the newspaper continues to deteriorate. From Staff Writer Marlene Naanes, a busy police reporter, we have: "At least 10 drunken driving arrests marred North Jersey roads ...." That is really the wrong word.

Rubbing salt in his wounds

Image via Wikipedia

A great newspaper acknowledges its mistakes. But at The Record of Woodland Park, editors do everything possible to hide their boneheaded decisions from readers. A perfect example is the brief story on Page A-4 today reporting that readers of the New York Post voted a Record staffer's 9/11 photo as the tabloid's cover of the decade.

Of course, The Record story carefully omits any mention of  how Editor Frank Scandale -- handling the biggest story of his life -- shamefully put money over journalism on Sept. 11, 2001, keeping Record photographer Thomas E. Franklin's unique flag-raising photo off of the front page and shoving it so far back in the paper, it ran on Page A-32 on Sept. 12, 2001. Although the photo was available in plenty of time for The Record's first edition, Scandale was told it would "cost too much" to remake Page 1.


The Post ran the photo on its front page the next day, Sept. 13, without giving credit to Franklin or The Record. The photo was used later on a U.S. postage stamp, but failed to win the Pulitzer Prize -- maybe because The Record and Scandale treated it so shabbily. It shows three firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center -- an image that has become one of the most famous in the history of photojournalism and recalls the iconic photo taken during World War II on Iwo Jima (photo below shows monument.)

Image by dbking via Flickr

This may be why Scandale talks incessantly about what he did at the Denver Post more than a decade ago or at Reuters wire service before that, but never boasts of what he has done since he came to The Record.

Bad start to a new year

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr

The first day of the new year doesn't bode well for readers of  The Record of Woodland Park, which continues to downplay the worsening obesity epidemic and ignore local news.

The lazy, incompetent editors have stubbornly refused to launch a North Jersey obesity project, which could improve the health of readers. But they had no trouble squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries and nearly three years on the recently concluded vendetta against Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. (See post of Dec. 16, 2009.)

On Page A-15 today, The Record prints its "editorial credo," as it does every year. Don't read this too closely or it might resemble a fairy tale.

For example, I wonder how readers in Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, and all the other towns that get spotty news coverage feel about this sentence in the credo: "Our function is to serve the public interest...." And in reading the credo year after year when I worked there, I always worried that the editorial and opinion staff  worked "under the editor, with occasional suggestions and guidance from the editor/vice president, president and chairman of the board (Stephen A. Borg and his father, Malcolm A. Borg, respectively, neither of whom are journalists).

Stephen Borg, a marketing guru who also is publisher of The Record and Herald News, always seems intent on stretching the truth, as in his choice of  "The Trusted Local Source" to replace "Friend of The People It Serves" under the masthead on Page 1. He also promised food and education coverage "every day," but the editors have failed to deliver. And, of course, the biggest joke he played on employees when he took over was declaring, "I'm not in this for the money," then trading up to a $3.65 million estate with a mortgage from his family's North Jersey Media Group. Cutbacks at the daily papers soon followed, including the move of virtually all of the editors and reporters out of a landmark building in Hackensack, the Bergen County seat.

About the only good thing you can say about the younger Borg is that he repudiated many of the news coverage policies of Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale and called for the appointment of an obituary writer to give an eloquent farewell to notable and intriguing North Jerseyans (after years of increasingly spare coverage of locals who died). The work of veteran Staff Writer Jay Levin, a former colleague of mine on the news copy desk, has often been the highlight of the Local section. Today, Levin does a round-up of those who died in 2009.

The first restaurant review of the new year is written by Bill Pitcher, the so-called food editor, replacing Elisa Ung, who is on leave until summer, according to a note at the end of the column in Better Living. Unfortunately, Ung's two-star review of Bahama Breeze, a fake-Caribbean chain restaurant that opened this year on the highway in Wayne, will haunt Pitcher, who gives only two and a half stars to Bistro 55 in Rochelle Park, even though the chef makes an effort to serve naturally raised food.

And in view of the obesity epidemic, isn't it time for Pitcher to break the mold of how restaurants are reviewed and substitute a salad or a cheese-and-fruit course for all those gooey, artery-clogging desserts he and Ung devour and obsess over? He sampled four of them for this review alone.