Decade in review: Our paper changed

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Don't let today's decade-in-review edition of The Record of Woodland Park fool you about changes in North Jersey. You won't read a word about how the former Hackensack daily began a slow decline under the leadership of  a dictatorial editor who downplayed the importance of local news and two greedy Borg siblings who backed him.

But I want to interrupt this condemnation to praise Road Warrior John "Drivers' Best Friend" Cichowski for finally paying some attention to bus riders in today's column on the Local front, although the headline overstates the case. Now, he should ride one of the creaking local buses, such as the No. 780 between Englewood and the city of Passaic, to see a real horror show.

The lazy, incompetent editors assigned Staff Writer Mike Kelly to write the decade in review on Page 1. "It's been a weary and worrisome 10 years," he writes. Indeed, I can say the same for his columns. Kelly writes about bricks and mortar, and infrastructure, and touches oh-so-briefly on changes in the media, including declining newspaper readership, but is silent in those two bare paragraphs about The Record.

You won't find anything in his boring piece -- or the reviews on the Local front and elsewhere -- about how we've changed as a people or how the election of our first black president unleashed racism and opponents so desperate to smear him they invoked the Holocaust or simply told lies -- aided and abetted by the media.

Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale came to The Record at the beginning of the decade and -- faced with his biggest story ever, 9/11 -- showed a colossal lack of news judgment by running Tom Franklin's incredible flag-raising photo on a back page. Then, in response to falling readership, he commissioned coverage aimed at 20-year-olds, and later banned one-town stories from the front page.

After the final weekday news meeting, Scandale used to send one of his subordinates over to the news copy desk where I worked to tell us what words he wanted on the front page and what words he didn't want there ("Frank wants this..., Frank doesn't want that...") One day, Chris Maurus, then the Page 1 editor, announced that Frank didn't want any mention of the Pulaski Skyway (photo) in a front-page story about crumbling infrastructure. Why?  He had never used it and he didn't think our readers knew where it was.

In 2006, Stephen A. Borg took over running the dailies from his publisher father, repudiated Scandale's 20-year-old feature coverage and nearly everything else Scandale did, yet promoted the editor to vice president. Borg, tiring of his $2 million house in Tenafly, obtained a $3.65 million mortgage from North Jersey Media Group so he could trade up to an estate in the same town.

He and his big sister, Jennifer A. Borg, NJMG vice president and general counsel,  invested money in an Englewood wine bar, a curious move for the children of a reformed alcoholic, and had a story about the place published in The Record's feature pages.

With more than $3.5 million tied up in Stephen's house, NJMG's two daily papers -- The Record and Herald News -- underwent a restructuring in 2008 and the smaller staffs were crammed into a newsroom in Woodland Park, virtually completing the company's abandonment  of Hackensack that began with the move of all printing to Rockaway Township. That forced NJMG to give up its hugely profitable commercial printing operation.

At the same time, news coverage of the city where The Record was founded in 1895 and had prospered for more than 110 years declined drastically. This year, more than a month passed on two occasions without a story about Hackensack in the former Bergen Record.

Around the time of the restructuring, Jennifer Borg capped severance at 12 weeks' salary, because payments to veterans who had left were adversely impacting the bottom line. This year, NJMG retirees were informed of cuts in their medical benefits.

Through 2007, 2008 and most of 2009, hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries were squandered on an investigation of a single law enforcement official led by editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes, head of the assignment desk. A single story was published Dec. 16 on the Local front, and it certainly was laughable.


The "what made news" review on the Local front today touches on 36 towns -- compared to about 90 in The Record's circulation area. You want to laugh? Read the items about Hackensack and Englewood. Yet more than half of L-7 is devoted to a model train club in Paterson.

See anything good in the paper? Click on "comments" at the end of this post and let the world know.