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| Hackensack residents awoke on Wednesday morning to find a crusty layer of snow covering their solar panels, above, and car windshields. |
By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR
Page 1 is often considered the most important in a newspaper, but at The Record, you're as likely to find serious errors there as on any other page.
Today, a front-page photo caption contains a boneheaded mistake, and Mike Kelly's Page 1 column on the Boston Marathon bombing brings a dead cop back to life. (A-1 and A-7).
Wrecking a story
The A-1 photo caption claims "demolition began Tuesday on LG Electronics buildings in Englewood Cliffs" (A-1).
That's ridiculous.
The demolition -- to make way for a new, taller headquarters on the east side of Sylvan Avenue, atop the Palisades -- was of vacant buildings "where LG plans to build its new North American headquarters," as the story on L-1 reports in the first paragraph.
The Record's reporters and editors have written so many stories about LG's controversial plan they don't even bother to say precisely where the new building will be located or what was there before, leading to the kind of serious error that appears on Page 1 today.
And, it appears, six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton no longer has her staff proof Page 1 before it goes to press or after the paper is printed.
Readers' marathon
Readers can only hope Kelly stays in Boston after covering the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing (A-1).
Forget about his monotonous first paragraph, where he uses the verb "gaze" for perhaps the thousandth time.
On the continuation page, Kelly reports "relatives of the three spectators who perished ... and a police officer who was fatally shot later in a confrontation with the alleged bombers visited the finish line" (A-7).
Of course, the dead cop is still in his grave.
But no one caught this mistake -- not the assignment editor who read it first or the news editor who made up the page or the copy editor who supposedly edited the story or the supervisor of the copy desk who supposedly went over his or her work, and approved it for publication.
Parking-lot news
What are two photos showing a man with homing pigeons, all from Stony Point, N.Y., doing on L-3 today, in the Local news section?
They happen to be in the parking lot of 1 Garret Mountain Plaza, and in the background, readers can see the nondescript office building the Woodland Park daily has called home since leaving Hackensack in 2009.
Gee whiz. I guess Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza didn't have any legitimate municipal news for his section today.
Did that lazy editor send a photographer to the parking lot for a shitty "story" about flying birds?
Shameless plug
A day after Better Living editors debuted a "health page" with a strong focus on food, a story on Easter Brunch today recommends readers buy a smoked ham that is apparently filled with harmful preservatives and animal antibiotics (BL-1).
The piece, by a free-lancer, is a shameless plug for a single pork store in Fair Lawn, and doesn't mention readers can buy uncured, naturally raised hams at Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe's and other stores that would be a lot better for them.
