Three-day weekend for staff

If you thought, after looking at Saturday's edition, the staff of The Record of Woodland Park started its weekend on Friday, today's paper only reinforces the impression. Except for a Michael Gartland story on lavish spending by a non-profit Bergen County agency on Page 1, you'll find barely four inconsequential stories about Bergen towns in the entire paper.

You know there is no municipal, development or education news of Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood -- or many other Bergen towns -- in the former Hackensack daily by looking at Page L-6 and the three, long, wire-service obituaries of people you may have never heard of -- that's what the lazy, desperate, incompetent editors call "filler." You also know it by a brief on L-2 about kindergarten registration in Ramsey -- a waste of precious space for information that goes home in every kid's backpack. Does reporter Allison Pries really think this is education news?

So what do you find in today's former Bergen Record? Stories about the Passaic County Sheriff's Department, a possible festival in West Milford, budget woes in that sprawling township, smoking at a Morris County college and a deer hunt on Garret Mountain -- near the paper's new headquarters. The incompetent editors put a story about three New Milford Eagle Scouts on L-1. Wow. That's real news.

There isn't much in the rest of the Sunday paper, which squanders most of the front page on a stupid football game and the endless palaver over a guard who left his post and a man who entered a secure area at Newark airport to see his girlfriend off. On the front of Better Living, a copy editor must have thought it clever to say: "Where North Jersey chefs go to get their eats on." How ridiculous.

It's hard to believe Publisher Stephen A. Borg can read the paper day after day and not wonder why it consistently fails its Bergen County readers or what the editors and some of the reporters are doing to earn their salaries. When I still worked in the old Hackensack newsroom, other staffers reported that sports reporter John Rowe overheard the wealthy, arrogant Borg say his goal in cutting costs was a news staff where no one made more than $40,000 a year.

I doubt Borg achieved his ridiculous salary goal for the staff, but since he took over and promoted Editor Frank "The Fish Stinks from the Head Down" Scandale to vice president, The Record and North Jersey Media Group's laughable Web site -- northjersey.com -- sure read like they are being put together by demoralized, low-paid workers.