'Punch' obituary puts focus on the Borgs

Lincoln Tunnel rush hour: Five lanes of traffic into two. Why doesn't The Record write about commuting problems instead of such topics as scrutiny of school bus drivers?

Another boring report on crumbling infrastructure and a speculative story on state revenue guarantee that all eyes notice the three-column item at the top of Page 1 today -- reporting the death of former New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger.

Of course, many readers know why his death is front-page news: Marty Gottlieb, The Record's editor, spent many years working for Sulzberger in New York and Paris.

But in the past, The Record has denied some  prominent New and North Jerseyans similar notice on A-1.

I'm not sure why the Sulzberger obituary on A-6 today is from a Times' rival, The Washington Post. And what's with the nearly 40-year-old photo of Sulzberger?

Borg on 'Punch'

Among those reacting to the death is Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg, chairman of North Jersey Media Group, who handed the publisher reins to one of his Silver Spoons, Stephen A. Borg.

The elder Borg isn't half the man of Sulzberger, whom he describes as "an extraordinary gentlemen, and a person who would guard the reputation of his product with his life."

(Production Editor Liz Houlton and her crack copy editors missed "gentlemen" instead of "gentleman.") 

Record v. Times

Readers know Mac Borg hasn't guarded the reputation of The Record, which has published several flattering stories about Borg family friends and business associates.

And on three days last week, an ad for a Japanese clothing retailer was wrapped around Page 1, and the Better Living and Business sections published lavishly promotional pieces on the opening of its Paramus store. 

Selfish son

They also know that Stephen Borg has put his selfish interests above the financial health of the newspaper, purchasing a $3.65 million Tenafly McMansion with a company mortgage only several months before a major downsizing.

The younger Borg also engineered NJMG's  wholesale abandonment of Hackensack, and stood by when his chief assignment editor, Deirdre Sykes, followed suit by largely ignoring non-police news from the city where The Record had prospered for more than 110 years.

News or views?

Is there any news on Page 1 today?

I got a kick out of the "ANALYSIS" suggesting Governor Christie may close the gap "between optimistic budget projections and the state's gloomy revenue totals," and deliver a tax credit.

But the editors don't mention the weakness of Christie's plan: the recipients of huge corporate bonuses and stock-market profits pay little or no tax.

The governor is going to get screwed by the very same millionaires he has made immune from a tax surcharge. LOL.

Call me maybe

On the front of Local, Road Warrior John Cichowski addresses a compelling road safety issue: why school buses don't carry phone numbers on their sides (L-1).

The answer is obviously so drivers won't be pestering the attractive female school-bus drivers for dates.

Dissing Hackensack

The only Hackensack news today is from the police blotter: a brawl at General Poor's, the Main Street tavern that has been the scene of numerous going-away parties for Record staffers (L-3).

The brown-nosing Sykes ordered the reporter to list every one of the 11 police agencies that responded, thereby ensuring that in the future none of them will refuse to release routine crime information.

Shifting the blame

In Better Living, Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung just doesn't get it.

As a consumer advocate, she should use her Corner Table column to report on the bad behavior of restaurant owners and chefs, not customers (BL-1).

I can think of owners and chefs who list "red snapper," but serve mystery fish; who buy low-cost, conventionally raised or grown food to boost their profits; and who gouge customers on wine purchases.

And many of them pay servers a minimum wage of under $3 an hour, then put the burden on customers to make up the difference through tips.

If Columnist Mike Kelly is going to rail about the "sound of gunfire" and "dilapidated housing" in Paterson (Opinion front), why doesn't he have the balls to criticize Christie for forcing the layoffs of more than 100 cops or to name all of the slumlords?

Praise the Lord for police shootings

Image by Tony the Misfit via Flickr

The Editorial Page editor wants to consolidate Wayne and Paterson schools. For his next act, Alfred P. Doblin will try to go over the Great Falls in a barrel.

Editors Francis Scandale and Deirdre Sykes are desperately praying for another police shooting to fill news columns -- just as an incident did on the front page today and on the Local front Thursday. 

So, why did the fatal shooting of a suspect end up on Local, while the wounding of another is all over Page 1 today in The Record of Woodland Park?

Three photos on A-1 and A-10 show nothing more than police officers walking or standing around and "beginning to investigate," according to the wildly optimistic caption. 

Screw the union

The turnpike's unionized toll collectors will be allowed to keep their jobs, but their average $65,000 salaries will be cut more than $15,000 by July 2012 (A-1).

Compare that to the immediate $10,000 cut in the salary of reporter Elaine D'Aurizio, who has since retired, and other staffers engineered by Publisher Stephen A. Borg, with the advice and consent of Scandale and other editors.

A graphic on A-1 Wednesday was so cockeyed it required a long correction today on A-2, along with five corrections from Thursday's school board election results.

Come back later

You won't find the suspect's name in the Page 1 shooting story or even a description, nor is the officer or officers who shot him identified. In the fatal shooting story on L-1 Thursday, the officer's identity also was withheld.

Governor Christie's spokesman had noting to say about a new name for Xanadu -- American Dream Meadowlands -- or a fall 2013 opening date (A-1).

Many reporters for The Record appear to stand there with their hands out for information, and don't argue when told to come back later or call me tomorrow.

LOL at Doblin

What a hoot. Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin knows there's absolutely zero chance of success for his school-district consolidation plan -- combining Paterson and Wayne, Newark and Milburn, and others across the state (A-21).

But he doesn't tell readers why: Most white suburbanites will fight to the death for their "neighborhood schools" to avoid having their kids rub shoulders with blacks and Hispanics in neighboring towns.

After all, didn't Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg send young Stephen to a private high school in Englewood for just that reason?

Dumb and dumber

Today's Road Warrior column on L-1 is a case of dumb readers' questions and dumber answers.

Where is the Teaneck reporter? An item on L-5 carries the Hackensack reporter's tag line.

Fat of the land

Did Grissini in Englewood Cliffs bribe Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung for her "Good to Excellent" rating in Better Living today?

Ung says she was served "gummy" cake for $12, "dry" veal for $38, "overcooked and dry" salmon fillet for $29 and shrimp with disgusting, dangling "dark veins" for $28 -- yet she bestows two and a half stars on the so-called fine-dining restaurant.

She also must have been groggy from overindulging when she wrote that the chef "marvels at his freedom to purchase high-quality ingredients." 

But then she fails to tell readers if the overpriced salmon was wild or the filet mignon and veal were raised without antibiotics and growth hormones.

Young Borg's big mistakes

Image by Joel Price via Flickr

Mistake that turned

his life upside down

When I first saw this headline on Page 1 of  The Record of Woodland Park today, I thought it would be appropriate to describe mistakes made by Publisher Stephen A. Borg that turned employees' lives upside down.

After he took over from his father, he moved printing of The Record and Herald News to Rockaway Township from Hackensack, sacrificing highly profitable commercial printing and prompting the layoff of more than 50 press workers, not to mention incurring the high cost of fuel and extra wear and tear on the Mercedes delivery trucks burning up Route 80 every day.

 Then, he scattered workers in the Hackensack newsroom to the four winds, depriving editors and reporters of a shared purpose, which you can see in the lousy local news coverage and a front page that chases every sensational story just to sell papers.

Now, the landmark building is nearly empty -- with Chairman Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg making North Jersey Media Group's last stand -- and 150 River St. apparently is unsellable in a down market. Wasn't unloading the underused building and surrounding land the whole point of moving to Woodland Park?

But today's A-1 headline is not about Borg, it's about the poor, lovelorn schmuck who ducked under a rope at Newark airport and triggered a security lock-down -- in other words, much ado about nothing. Is this really front-page news? Even the judge didn't think so, giving the defendant community service and fining him $500.

Governor Christie is on A-1 again today, blasting his predecessor for making a deal that will prevent Christie from laying off unionized state workers before January. So, the governor is pissed at Jon Corzine. How many thousands are pissed at Christie, who is planning a wide range of cuts that would affect working and middle classes, while easing the tax burden on the Borgs and other wealthy families?

So what's on the front of Local? A burned body found under a Route 46 bridge in Little Ferry is the best the lazy, incompetent assignment desk under Deirdre Sykes can do today. Three of the four education stories on L-2 are from Passaic County.

With Staff Writer Joseph Ax writing about Haiti again, there is no Teaneck news. Nor will you find any stories from Hackesnsack, Englewood and a lot of other Bergen County towns.

The front of Buisness shills for the makers of 3-D TVs (photo) with lots of color, upbeat headlines and text full of quotes from executives salivating over the prospect of huge bonuses.

Bad start to a new year

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr

The first day of the new year doesn't bode well for readers of  The Record of Woodland Park, which continues to downplay the worsening obesity epidemic and ignore local news.

The lazy, incompetent editors have stubbornly refused to launch a North Jersey obesity project, which could improve the health of readers. But they had no trouble squandering hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff salaries and nearly three years on the recently concluded vendetta against Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. (See post of Dec. 16, 2009.)

On Page A-15 today, The Record prints its "editorial credo," as it does every year. Don't read this too closely or it might resemble a fairy tale.

For example, I wonder how readers in Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, and all the other towns that get spotty news coverage feel about this sentence in the credo: "Our function is to serve the public interest...." And in reading the credo year after year when I worked there, I always worried that the editorial and opinion staff  worked "under the editor, with occasional suggestions and guidance from the editor/vice president, president and chairman of the board (Stephen A. Borg and his father, Malcolm A. Borg, respectively, neither of whom are journalists).

Stephen Borg, a marketing guru who also is publisher of The Record and Herald News, always seems intent on stretching the truth, as in his choice of  "The Trusted Local Source" to replace "Friend of The People It Serves" under the masthead on Page 1. He also promised food and education coverage "every day," but the editors have failed to deliver. And, of course, the biggest joke he played on employees when he took over was declaring, "I'm not in this for the money," then trading up to a $3.65 million estate with a mortgage from his family's North Jersey Media Group. Cutbacks at the daily papers soon followed, including the move of virtually all of the editors and reporters out of a landmark building in Hackensack, the Bergen County seat.

About the only good thing you can say about the younger Borg is that he repudiated many of the news coverage policies of Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale and called for the appointment of an obituary writer to give an eloquent farewell to notable and intriguing North Jerseyans (after years of increasingly spare coverage of locals who died). The work of veteran Staff Writer Jay Levin, a former colleague of mine on the news copy desk, has often been the highlight of the Local section. Today, Levin does a round-up of those who died in 2009.

The first restaurant review of the new year is written by Bill Pitcher, the so-called food editor, replacing Elisa Ung, who is on leave until summer, according to a note at the end of the column in Better Living. Unfortunately, Ung's two-star review of Bahama Breeze, a fake-Caribbean chain restaurant that opened this year on the highway in Wayne, will haunt Pitcher, who gives only two and a half stars to Bistro 55 in Rochelle Park, even though the chef makes an effort to serve naturally raised food.

And in view of the obesity epidemic, isn't it time for Pitcher to break the mold of how restaurants are reviewed and substitute a salad or a cheese-and-fruit course for all those gooey, artery-clogging desserts he and Ung devour and obsess over? He sampled four of them for this review alone.