A reader-friendly front page

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Now, this is a front page thousands of readers can relate to: Fare hikes and service cuts at NJ Transit, rising health insurance premiums for small businesses and, some really good news, more tickets for drivers who text or talk behind the wheel.

Why can't The Record of Woodland Park do this every day? These are the kind of quality-of-life issues North Jersey residents want to see reported even more than sensational crime stories and sports news. The NJ Transit story made radio news today and at least one station gave credit to "The Record of Hackensack."

The impact of Page 1 is lost by the time you get to the wishy-washy editorial on A-20, which lets Governor Christie and the acting transportation czar off the hook for not seeking higher gasoline taxes to fund road, bridge and mass transit projects, and for cutting NJ Transit subsidies.

Christie is favoring drivers and penalizing mass transit users who choose to leave their cars at home, as well as local bus riders who can't afford cars. 


Two Englewood stories appear in Local, the first since Feb. 18. Staff Writer Giovanna Fabiano reports that Mayor Frank Huttle strongly criticized city employees for doing a poor job of plowing -- during and after the two-day snowstorm last week.

Rather than going to Englewood right after the storm and reporting what she saw, Fabiaono attended a council meeting Tuesday night to get the story, which appears nearly a week after the storm ended. She didn't, for example, see or report how pedestrians were forced on Monday to walk in the narrow, dangerous roadway of Forest Avenue, not far from the Teaneck border, because property owners hadn't cleared their sidewalks.

As far as I know, The Record gives a pass to towns after every snowstorm, rarely if ever rating them on the effectiveness of plowing streets and clearing bus stops or reporting that some homeowners don't bother to shovel snow off their sidewalks.  

Head Assignment Editor Deirde Sykes and her lazy, incompetent minions simply don't care about readers' problems driving or walking after a snowstorm. Apparently, all the ungainly Sykes can manage is to try and avoid a repeat of her falling to the ground and injuring herself, as she did many years ago in the Hackensack parking lot.

You won't find any Hackensack or Teaneck news in the paper today.

Finally, for those who believe my tone is too harsh, all I can say is these are the high standards I was held to during 15-plus years as a reporter for The Record and two other daily newspapers, and during my seven years of freelance writing for The Record's Food section. Those standards were even higher during my nearly 20 years as a news copy editor in Hackensack.

In view of the dire straits The Record and other newspapers find themselves in, owners, editors and reporters should continue to be held to these high standards, and shouldn't belly-ache when they are taken to task for failing to live up to their responsibilities.

Front-page correction

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Under Publisher Stephen A. Borg and Editor Frank Scandale, The Record of Woodland Park discarded high standards for its front page.

Recall the shameful episode on 9/11, when Scandale put money over journalism and buried Tom Franklin's incredible flag-raising photo at Ground Zero on a back page. And since Borg took over in 2006, Page 1 has reeked more and more of the locker room. (I'm not referring to the helmet scam story at the bottom of A-1 today.)

So what happens when a a cop is shot and a police chase ends in the death of an innocent? Do you discard your lead front-page story and go tabloid? If you are The Record, you go for it, especially if Tom Troncone, a former police reporter, is the assignment editor on duty, as he might have been on Monday night.

But the bold headline that was designed to sell papers Tuesday morning -- "Cop shot; woman killed" -- came back to bite the incompetent editors the next day, when law enforcement officials said a man, not a woman, was killed. So today, the story goes back on A-1 with a real clunky headline -- "Cops unravel tragedy." I submit it's the family and the editors who are unraveling what happened.

Jerry DeMarco's Cliffview Pilot.com reported the incident correctly.

This story didn't belong on The Record's front page to begin with, and its placement there again today is questionable. (On the jump page, A-6, editors run not one but two photos of cops "canvassing" the scene of a fatal accident. What a waste of space.) The correction on A-2 notes "incorrect information from a law enforcement official," but doesn't refer to the A-1 story, where the reporter blames the error on police "confusion."

If Borg, Scandale and their lazy, incompetent minions had any standards, Governor Christie's slash-and-burn cost cutting would command space on Page 1 every day, joined by such important stories as looming fare hikes and service cuts at NJ Transit, which will affect tens of thousands of people in North Jersey, many of whom have to rely on the wheezing local bus system because they can't afford cars.

In Local, three-quarters of a page is devoted to listing the names of school board candidates in Bergen County and part of Hudson County. I guess you have to do this a day after you assign eight reporters to the same story, and give readers little information. 

The Record can't hide how its editors and reporters are bored with covering municipal and school board elections.

Click on this link: The Record's front page today 

Eight reporters, no information

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Why did eight reporters at The Record of Woodland Park work on a single story about school board candidates? And why does the story, on the front of Local, contain only one paragraph about Hackesnsack with nothing more than the hopefuls' names?

That one paragraph appears to be the only mention of Hackensack in the entire paper today except for the erroneous listing of the paper's address on Page A-2. (Photo: The Meadowlands.)


The lead Page 1 story -- "Cop shot; woman killed" -- is so poorly edited, readers don't know if she is an innocent or a suspect until they pore over the continuation on A-6. The story came in late? That's no excuse.

Given outrageous ticket prices and exorbitant fees on their purchase, is anybody really upset by the $25 million ticket scam that is all over A-1 today? The only problem is that the ticket sellers might raise fees to make up the lost revenue, if they weren't insured for the theft of 1.5 million tickets.

On A-8, an editorial gives Staff Writer Michael Gartland well-deserved credit for exposing financial abuses at Bergen County school districts, a story he won't let drop.

Why does the front of Business carry a wire service story about the credit and job woes of an auto mechanic in Wisconsin? Is no one in North Jersey in a similar fix?

Are the editors a bunch of racists?

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News coverage of minorities has never been a strong suit at The Record. Recall how Editor Frank Scandale got rid of his only Hispanic columnist and, several years later, his only black columnist. Or look at the racial makeup of editors and reporters -- only a handful are Latino or African-American.

Since the move of North Jersey Media Group and its flagship daily to Woodland Park from Hackensack in 2009, the focus of news stories also seems to have shifted west and north -- leaving only scattered municipal coverage of Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, the three most diverse communities in Bergen County.

For example, when is the last time you read a story about Englewood's segregated elementary and middle schools or a positive report on its large Jamaican community? Is this anyway to treat the city where you grew up, Publisher Stephen A. Borg? (Photo: Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack.)

Today's front page reflects Scandale's jock mentality -- most of it is squandered on the U.S. hockey loss at the Winter Olympics. It also downplays a more far-reaching story that the "odds of obesity appear stacked against black and Hispanic children starting even before birth, provocative new research suggests." A Page 1 item says the full story -- all eight paragraphs -- is on A-5.

The obesity epidemic is -- if you'll excuse me -- the elephant in the newsroom at The Record. The lazy, incompetent editors have resisted for many years launching a project on this important health issue. Food Editor Bill Pitcher also hasn't broken any new ground here.

Instead, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries to keep alive a vendetta against Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, producing a single, weak story on the front of Local in December after nearly three years of sleuthing.

Now, judging from the scarcity of bylines from two municipal reporters -- Monsy Alvarado and Shawn Boburg -- Sykes has them chasing another "great story." Alvarado and Boburg -- along with Jean Rimbach and others -- worked on the Mordaga fiasco. Rimbach likely has the fewest bylines of any reporter working for Sykes.