A lot of paper to recycle

The plastic bag I picked up from the driveway today was fat and heavy -- filled with The Record of Woodland Park and advertising inserts. Since I'm not in the market for anything, they went right into the recycling bin, and that was most of what was in the bag.

The most important story the incompetent, lazy editors could find to put on the front page was one about shopping -- par for the course since The Record spent a considerable chunk of money in an unsuccessful bid to get Sunday blue laws repealed. A story reporting a bigger state budget gap gets shoved inside. Doesn't that minimize its importance, despite the Page 1 tease?

There are three mentions in the paper, including on the front-page, of the increased demand for free food from pantries, but the Borg family has never fully acknowledged publicly how it contributed to the recession by ending North Jersey Media Group's highly profitable commercial printing, laying off more than 50 press workers, merging The Record with the Herald News, and shedding an unknown number of newsroom and advertising staffers, while capping severance pay at 12 weeks.

Nor has anyone calculated the impact on the Main Street economy of  Hackensack, where The Record was  founded in 1895 and prospered for more than 110 years, before the Borgs moved printing of the two papers, the main newsroom and hundreds of workers out of Bergen County -- months ahead of a schedule that appeared in a Business section story quoting Stephen and Jennifer Borg, the siblings running NJMG.

Don't worry. The recession hasn't seemed to hurt the family of Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg, NJMG chairman. I can just imagine the Borgs gathering for Thanksgiving today in Stephen's $3.65 million Tenafly mansion, bought with a mortgage from Dad's company, as was his previous, $2 million home.The turkey dinner the paper once bought for newsroom workers on duty today is a distant memory.

Hibernating reporter Giovanna Fabiano emerges from her den to report in the Local section today that the Libyan ambassador to the U.N. is expected to move into the Englewood mansion Libya bought in 1983. There were only six stories about Englewood in the paper in August -- and five of them were about Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. A story about adoption of a new master plan for Englewood -- of far more interest to the vast majority of residents -- gets only brief mention today.

These stories about the Libyans are designed to push readers' buttons and it's clear the editors hope to divert attention from the shameful job they are doing covering local news in Englewood, Hackensack and Teaneck. They also are driven by two men, Pay-To-Play Englewood Mayor Michael Wildes, a relentless self-promoter, and Shmuley Boteach, a wealthy, publicity-hungry rabbi who didn't seem to have a problem buying a mansion next door to the Libyans, but went ballistic when Gadhafi said he intended to stay there in the summer. Then, curiously, several weeks later, a long, promotional story about Rabbi Boteach's new book about pop king Michael Jackson appeared in The Record.

Despite recession, younger Borg prospers

Despite all the blows the newspaper industry and The Record and its employees have taken in the last few years, Publisher Stephen A. Borg continues to prosper. His infamous statement when he first met the newspaper's staff in mid-2006 -- "I'm not in this for the money" -- was an arrogant and clumsy attempt to distract them from one of his real goals as he assumed the helm from his father.

Borg is not only publisher of  The Record and Herald News, he also is president of privately held North Jersey Media Group, replacing Jon Markey, who announced his retirement in a bulletin board notice in December 2007. Friends of Markey say he was forced out after 15 years with the company so Borg, who was 41 then, could take his title and salary.

You may remember how Borg in 2006 showed The Record staff a slide of  his home on Birchwood Place in  Tenafly. What he didn't tell us was that the house was worth close to $2 million. He bought it in December 1999 with an $865,000 mortgage from the Bergen Record Corp. and sold it less than eight years later, in August 2007, for $2 million, according to public records.

Did Borg even make mortgage payments? If you think the $2 million was used to pay off the mortgage, with the remainder as a down payment on his new Tenafly home -- listed as an "estate" having 8,500 square feet, with six bedrooms and five full baths -- you'd be wrong. The home on Churchill Place was described as being on an acre "in the most prestigious section of Tenafly."

In September 2007, Borg bought the house with a mortgage of $3,650,000 -- the full price -- from his employer,  his family's North Jersey Media Group Inc., according to records of the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service. (About two months later, Markey was forced out so Borg could take his salary, according to friends.)

This is the house Rich Gigli was asked to photograph after The Record gave walking papers to the assistant managing editor of photography, who had around 30 years of service. Presumably, a painting made from the photo now hangs over the fireplace, where Borg, wife Monica and their children will be gathering for the holidays.

In last week's letter to retirees, NJMG Chairman "Mac" Borg -- Stephen's indulgent father -- doesn't say how many people will be affected by the cutback in medical benefits. But I'll bet that if the son had gotten his own mortgage, the $3.65 million tied up by his opulent lifestyle would have eased the pain considerably for retirees. Or, better yet, why couldn't Stephen Borg be satisfied with spending a few hundred grand on renovating and expanding the $2 million house he already owned?

"Mac" Borg has been listed among the 400 wealthiest Americans by Forbes magazine. Stephen and Jennifer Borg, the older sister who is an NJMG vice president and general counsel, hold themselves out as young sophisticates, having invested money in a wine bar in Englewood; hopefully, that came from their inflated salaries at Mac Daddy's company, not from NJMG. They and their father probably feel they own the world. They certainly act as if they own their employees, even after they've left The Record.

See prior post: "Mac delivers bad news to retirees."