Ex-Record staffer Jim Norman launches an online news site dedicated to Teaneck

A cartoon from Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Even if you're not thrown off the plane, flying United has been an ordeal since the airline cut legroom along with such amenities as free music channels.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Jim Norman, a former reporter for The Record of Woodland Park, has launched an online newspaper devoted to Teaneck, where he lives.

Norman, editor and publisher, calls the Teaneck Independent the township's "real newspaper."

Read more here.

Local news

Norman's venture should succeed, judging by the dramatic decline in local news in The Record since an initial newsroom downsizing in 2008.

That was followed in 2009 by the move of the paper and North Jersey Media Group to Woodland Park from Hackensack,where the Borg family had prospered for more than 110 years.

Gannett, which bought NJMG last July, has cut more than 350 jobs since November, and moved production of the redesigned print edition of The Record to Neptune.

That's the township on the Jersey shore, not the planet.

Record reader and sports fan catches a major error on today's Local news front

Kevin Meistickle in a photo by Melinda Meistickle from the 1970s.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

A sports fan who is a careful reader of The Record says a story about a former West Milford man on the Local news front is "misleading" and "in error."

Despite the words "former Met" in the headline, Kevin Meistickle never played for the baseball team, the reader said in an email to The Sasson Report.

Victor: There are two things that are clearly misleading -- the headline says "Former Met"  that clearly implies that he played for the Mets.  

He never played a game for them and I do not even know if they signed him to a contract. It is not unusual for teams to draft players but not sign them for a variety of reasons.

Calling him a former Met would be like calling someone who ran in a primary for U.S. senator as a "former senator." 

The sentence that "Kevin Meistickle spent roughly a decade playing professional baseball for the Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves" clearly connotes that he played for those teams. 

It should have said "Kevin Meistickle spent roughly a decade playing professional baseball in the farm systems of the Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves."  

Either poor editing or the author [reporter David M. Zimmer] did not understand the distinctions or both. 

Errors have mounted since the unannounced redesign of The Record of Woodland Park in November, and the money-saving shift of production to a Gannett Co. design center in Neptune, where the publisher puts out seven New Jersey dailies.

In an earlier email, the Record reader said: 

 I never heard of this fellow. After a close reading of the article, it appears that he never played a game in the major leagues, but it was not clear. 

I checked him on the Baseball Reference.com website, which has every person who ever played a game in the majors. He was not listed. It appears that he was a career minor leaguer.

 The article could not be more misleading.

Besides shifting production to Neptune, Gannett apparently no longer publishes corrections on the second page of the paper, as The Record did occasionally when it was owned by the Borg family.