Utterly alone in the courtroom

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During the eight days my age-discrimination suit was tried in Superior Court, I sat alone at the table reserved for the plaintiff, and no one showed up to sit on the benches in a sign of support. I noticed the eight jurors watching me on occasion as I sat by myself, taking notes, looking for documents or just listening. Now, I wonder whether they drew any conclusions from my isolation.

The defendants were represented by Samuel J. Samaro, head of the employment practice at Pashman Stein in Hackensack; Dina L. Sforza, the in-house attorney for North Jersey Media Group; and Jennifer A. Borg, NJMG vice president and general counsel.

I objected to Borg's presence, because she was scheduled to testify and would gain an advantage from hearing other witnesses, but the judge said that as a defendant, she had a right to be there. Normally, witnesses are sequestered.

Samaro was hired during the discovery phase and took two of the three depositions I gave in my lawyer's office in Morristown. He acted tough at times, taking off his glasses, staring right into my eyes and  telling me I had to answer all of his questions. He joined the defense after NJMG apparently lost confidence in Sforza to see the case through to the end. Sforza didn't attend the entire trial.


Borg took copious notes, spoke to Samaro frequently, suggested questions and possibly motions, and made numerous calls to her office. At other times, she spoke to her fellow lawyers unselfconsciously about children, her nephews (Stephen Borg's four sons), her orange Land Rover sport-utility vehicle, which she referred to as an "Orange Beast" that attracts police like a magnet; her driving record, a speeding ticket she received and other subjects.

None of my former colleagues appeared in the courtroom (besides Patricia Mack and Aaron Elson, both of whom testified). Nor did Joshua L. Weiner, the attorney who helped me prepare for trial and who had represented me along with his father, Paul, since last summer. My 12-year-old son, Roshane, was off from school, but he threatened to shout out at the defendants' witnesses, "Lies! It's all lies!" He stayed home. A couple of times, I saw and spoke with Kibret Markos, the paper's courthouse reporter, but he didn't write a word.

When Stephen A. Borg testified in front of the jury, he wore a dark suit and tie -- in contrast to the wrinkled white shirt, open at the collar, and slacks he wore to his deposition on Dec. 7, 2009, at 1 Garret Mountain in Woodland Park. His hair was a mess. He spoke about his grandfather on his mother's side, Charles Agemian, who was born in Aleppo, Syria, and how he was writing a story about him for (201) magazine.

Of course, Stephen Borg wasn't aware that my both of my Jewish parents were born in Aleppo, or that the day of his deposition also was the anniversary of my mother's death in 1993.

At the trial, he testified that Dec. 7, 2009, was the first time he had met me, despite all the e-mails I had sent him for many months before I left The Record in May 2008, or as he put it, This is the first time I can pick him "out of a lineup." Asked to explain to the jury what he meant by lineup, he said it was merely a figure of speech.

Not much to read

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I was up about 7:30 this morning, had some juice and, while my coffee brewed, went out in my bath robe to fetch The Record of Woodland Park. By 8, I had finished "reading" the former Hackensack daily.

OK. It took a little longer to leaf through the paper, scan the headlines and mutter, Who cares?

The Local section, as usual, was devoid of any education or other news about the core Bergen towns of Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, highly diverse communities where readership is high. (Circulation figures for The Record now include the Herald News, dubbed an "edition" of the larger paper, to hide from advertisers how many readers have abandoned The Record.)

True, as a former employee, I get a preferential subscription rate, but as a resident of Hackensack, even the 13 to 14 cents a copy I pay may not be worth it. And the shift away from covering the core Bergen towns began long before the newspaper moved its newsroom this year from Hackensack to Woodland Park, now also the home of North Jersey Media Group, which publishes the two daily newspapers.

Has anyone calculated the added pollution and the fuel wasted by the gas guzzlers driven by Stephen and Jennifer Borg, the siblings who now run NJMG, as they commute to Woodland Park, or by the fleet of Mercedes-Benz delivery trucks tearing up Route 80 between Rockaway Township, where the papers are printed, and Bergen County? The young Borgs certainly earn enough to trade in their SUVs for far more efficient hybrids, but do they care enough about the planet?

The rest of The Record today includes a lot of political news, including a bewildering, information-less story on Page A-4 supplied by the Star-Ledger on the change of guard in the state Senate and Assembly. I read the story, but understand nothing about what this means to me and others. What a waste of space.

Abandoning River City

Several years ago, The Record slowly began moving out of Hackensack, the city where it was founded in 1895. First, it shifted the printing of the newspaper from River Street to a press building it owns in Rockaway Township, a 60-mile round-trip.

Then, top managers and editors began merging the staffs of The Record and its sister publication, the Herald News, another daily, assigning virtually all of them to a building on Garret Mountain, in Woodland Park; a newsroom in Rockaway and offices of the weekly newspapers published by the North Jersey Media Group (NJMG), owner of the two dailies.

But Malcolm A. Borg, the ailing chairman of NJMG, whose father and grandfather ran The Record before him, still keeps his office in the mostly empty, four-story brick building in Hackensack; he has to drive only 6 miles to reach his home on the East Hill of Englewood.

The daily and weekly newspapers are now being run from Woodland Park by his spoiled children, Jennifer A. Borg, general counsel and vice president of NJMG, and Stephen A. Borg, Record and Herald News publisher and NJMG president. 

Readers have never been told of the printing and staff moves.

Moving the printing of  The Record to Rockaway forced NJMG to give up one of  its biggest profit centers: printing other newspapers, including USA Today. 

But it allowed the company to lay off more than 50 press workers. 

It also ended a tradition of rushing the first edition up to the Hackensack newsroom, where copy and news editors could read the paper, find errors and fix them. Thus began The Record's precipitous slide in quality, which continues today.

-- VICTOR E. SASSON