Does anybody care -- even a little?

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If you live in Hackensack and subscribe to The Record of Woodland Park like I do, you have to get out there and pick up your paper early. Are you thinking there is some important Hackensack news in the paper, or stories about Teaneck and Englewood? How naive can you be?

No. I should have gotten out there early today, because it is pouring, and the dysfunctional circulation department had some poor, exploited guy with three jobs steer his SUV down my street and throw my Sunday paper onto my driveway in a single plastic bag -- open to the rain. Most of the paper was soaked and it was past 10:30, so I couldn't call for a replacement. Hey, I have the news sections. Am I really missing anything in the other sections? Mike Kelly? Ha! What a joke.

Staff Writer Elise Young deserves to have most of the front page today for another in an occasional expose on the state's screwed-up public pension system, and even a law Governor Christie signed last month won't touch lobbyists who are enrolled in lifetime health care. But one great story can't carry the paper.

The lazy, incompetent news and food editors won't budge on assigning reporters to a project on the obesity epidemic, but A-1 today has a Star-Ledger story on overweight military recruits from New Jersey.

There is so little Bergen County news of any import in Local today, readers must feel they've been slapped in the face by head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes. Why is a story on two Catholic schools in East Rutherford and Wood-Ridge running today and not earlier in the week when The Record reported the closing of Paterson Catholic Regional High School?

Why is there a huge story about falling home values in Little Falls in my paper? Or a fish kill in Caldwell? Or Wayne's search for a superintendent? Or even a man shot in Paterson? Did nothing happen in Hackensack and Englewood?

Does former Publisher Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg, who lives in Englewood and goes to his Hackensack office, care about the lack of local news? Does Editor Frank Scandale care about the job he's doing at the former Hackensack daily or is he still boasting about what he did at The Denver Post more than 11 years ago? Do Mac's spoiled children -- Stephen and Jennifer, who are now running the paper from Woodland Park -- care? 


Does Sykes, who lives in tiny Harrington Park, care about the lack of local Bergen news? When is the last time you saw a story about Harrington Park in the paper? Must be a great place to live with low taxes and wonderful municipal and school officials, a veritable heaven on earth for home-rule advocates.

The sad truth is they don't care. The editors are secure in the knowledge they have employment for life -- no matter what they do in the newsroom -- because none of the Borgs pay any attention to the newsroom. If you're spent time around the Borgs, you know they act as if they are American royalty.


You should have seen Mac in the Bergen County Courthouse on April 9. He and Superior Court Judge Joseph S. Conte, who presided at the jury trial of my age-discrimination lawsuit, recalled a speech Mac had given on the courthouse steps. Then Mac, dressed in a beautiful pinstripe suit with a pocket square, was off to see Judge Peter Doyne, whose father the elder Borg knew. How cozy.