Hey, Mac, where are you?

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Hey, Mac, don't you see what they are doing to your newspaper? Don't you see how those lazy, incompetent editors have shifted the news focus away from Bergen County, alienating readers in Hackensack, Englewood, Teaneck and other important towns? Don't you see how the editors let their pals go days, weeks, months and even years without a byline, causing resentment among productive members of the news staff?

Don't you see how your two spoiled brats, Stephen and Jennifer, have pushed you aside and completely taken over?

You, Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg, are the chairman of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of  The Record, Herald News, weeklies and other publications, so why have you kept your office in the landmark building at 150 River St. when just about everybody else has moved to Woodland Park, Rockaway Township and other offices? What do you do all day?

I remember how full of bluster you were when, as publisher, you made your unannounced visits to the Hackensack newsroom  in the 1980s and 1990s, exchanging spirited banter with Record editors and reporters and even admonishing them about abusing the furniture.

I remember when you still had a personal chef in Hackensack and invited me to attend a lunch with Stephen Berger, then the newly appointed executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency I covered as the paper's transportation reporter.

You had never met Berger before, but you still drank then and you used the f-word to express your frustration with inaction on one of your pet projects -- an air museum at the Port Authority-owned Teterboro Airport. "What the f--k is going on with ....," your sentence began.

Since then, you have had big health problems and you are a shadow of the man you once were. As a reuslt, The Record is completely ruderless. Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale is a failure as a leader. Head Assignment Editor Deirdre "Laughs A Lot" Sykes seems unable to inspire her local reporters, and her deputies are clueless.

The front page of The Record of Woodland Park seems to reflect the paper's precipitous decline.

Most of the page is devoted to yet another infrastructure story by transportation reporter Karen Rouse, who seems to have pieced it together from news releases, a report and a few phone calls. Scandale hand-picked Rouse from his old newspaper, but she failed miserably when given a chance as an assistant assignment editor.

She also is lazy. When the newsroom was still in Hackensack, she couldn't muster the energy to walk across River Street to the bus station and ride the decrepit No. 780 local bus, which is used almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics who can't afford cars and which contrasts starkly with much newer NJ Transit buses for mostly white commuters to Manhattan.

The lead story on A-1 is a fascinating exploration of corrupt campaign financing based in Dumont by Staff Writer Ashley Kindergan, whose energy and unstinting leg work puts Rouse and many other reporters to shame. The story is yet another powerful argument for dismantling the home-rule system.

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On the front of Local, three of the four stories focus on Paterson, Passaic County and the Passaic River. The section has nothing but police news about Hackensack, where Mac Borg grew up, where The Record was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years.


 I never read The Record's sports columnists, but when I turned to Ian O'Connor's column on the incredible victory of the Saints in yesterday's Super Bowl, boy was I disappointed. This hack squanders his first six paragraphs on a detailed retelling of an interception and buries his lead -- that this was all about the triumph of the City of New Orleans, which was crapped on for so many years by the Bush administration after Hurricane Katrina.

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