The Record

Update: "The leadership of the Hackensack University Medical Center Board of Governors consulted with the hospital administration and everyone agreed to reverse the decision regarding The Record. We apologize to our patients and our staff for any inconvenience, and we apologize to The Record.  We are putting this incident behind us and moving forward." -- Statement issued by Rubenstein Associates on behalf of the HUMC Board.

Ignoring Mark Twain's advice about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel, the increasingly tone deaf Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC) will no longer advertise in The Record, and has banned the newspaper from being sold or distributed on hospital property.  The move appears to be retaliatory: The Record ran a story on Sunday that "detailed how various board members help to underwrite Bergen County's Democratic leadership and how several trustees do business with the hospital - a practice prohibited at some North Jersey hospitals." The Record also ran a hard-hitting story this week on contractor Joseph Sanzari, a major donor and HUMC player. 

HUMC may have a stronger case on pulling advertising than it does by banning the newspaper from their property.

The relationship between the hospital and politics was underscored recently by the conviction of former State Sen. Joseph Coniglio (D-Paramus) on federal corruption charges.  HUMC, which was not prosecuted and where one individual received immunity in order to testify, had hired Coniglio as a $5,000-per-month plumbing consultant, a move a jury found was to facilitate a the receipt in millions of dollars in state funds.

The feud between The Record, which actually defied the newspaper industry with an increase in circulation this year, and HUMC can't be good news for Bergen County Democrats.  Michael Kasparian, who succeeded Joseph Ferriero as County Chairman, is also a major player at HUMC, and Bill Maer, a political consultant for the BCDO, is also a HUMC lobbyist.  Kasparian ran on a platform that included a pledge for mandatory ethics training for party leaders; he has since decided that ethics training will be optional.  (And to The Record's credit, they noted that their Vice President and General Counsel, Jennifer Borg, is also on the HUMC board.)

Richard Benfield, a member of the New York Times editorial board and the editor of the New Jersey section, is retiring after a long career in journalism.  Hs spent nineteen years as editorial page editor for The Record, and headed The Record’s Trenton and Washington bureaus.  His op-ed on suburban political bosses – specifically Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero, ran on the New York Times’ national opinion page on January 1 and is a must-read for New Jerseyans.

Sources say that the Department of Law and Public Safety is not expected to file criminal charges against Jeff Pillets, a Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporter at The Record, after reviewing a report from the Department of Environmental Protection that Pillets removed public documents.  David Wald, a spokesman for Attorney General Anne Milgram, had no comment on the Pillets matter.  Written statements from Elaine Makatura, a spokesman for DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson, and Pillets, are essentially the same -- except on one point: the DEP says Pillets initially denied having the missing files, while Pillets says he was a model of cooperation.

The following is a written statement from Makatura, send to PolitickerNJ.com yesterday and today:

Jennifer Borg, who runs the legal department at The Record and is part of the family that owns the newspaper, continues to decline comment on the state probe of reporter Jeff Pillets, who allegedly removed state documents from the Department of Environmental Protection.  There is speculation that The Record and Pillets has retained a criminal defense attorney -- if the reporter is charged with stealing public documents, he could face time in prison -- but Borg, Pillets and his editor have not responded to numerous inquiries.  It's been a week since Pillets filed a story.

Often when a reporter uses phrases like "declined to answer questions", "had no comment for this article", and "did not respond to requests for an interview", it's usually not good for the person the story is about. 

At least it did not bode well for those who refused to answer questions posed by The Record's Jeff Pillets in a series of articles he wrote about EnCap that has recently earned him accolades from his peers.  The EnCap series was also "selected as a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting," (The Record, 8/22/08).

So it seems like a double standard when North Jersey Media Group Vice-President/Editor Frank Scandale declined to confirm or deny any investigation of Pillets by the New Jersey State Police for allegedly swiping some documents from the Department of Environmental Protection.

Instead Scandale punted PolitickerNJ.com's inquires to the Attorney General Office's who also declined to comment. 

But of course.  That's standard operating procedure for law enforcement folks.  It's not for a newspaper organization.

A convention cartoon by Jimmy Margulies, editorial cartoonist for The Record.: (www.northjersey.com)Several cartoonists from throughout the country converged upon the Democratic National Convention last week in Denver, and many more will attend this week's Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.

But their New Jersey comrades won't be joining them.

One hesitates to quote Shakespeare to the Editors of The Record. The thought of all that dust rising from their library shelves is enough to make me sneeze. They do, however, "protest too much".

The Editors of the Record (known affectionately as the "Hacks on the Hackensack") announced that they were closing their main office, firing photographers, and reporters would operate from homes and automobiles by cell phone. This announcement, in the context of falling subscription rates and declining advertising revenues, led to the inevitable observation that the Record is on a course to bankruptcy.

It was a fair point. Newspapers are failing every day. The Record is located in one of the best demographic regions of the nation but has been increasingly marginalized. Its readership is aging and limited to the least educated and lowest economic base of Bergen County. Subscription rates and the County mortality rate are almost exactly equal.

The Record probably would have died anyway but the decision to abandon its role as the staple of suburban living and adopt an angry and mean tone accelerated the larger destructive trends. Newspapers are dying every day but some survive by filling niches. The Star Ledger has become the only credible source of state news while the New York Times and Washington Post have become indispensable as sources of international or national information. The Record decided that it had a role as the mirror of everything that was ugly on the face of its own constituency.

A rather excellent column by The Record’s Charles Stile could put the kibosh on a fundraiser that was expected to bring in $60,000 for U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg’s re-election campaign.   The Lautenberg campaign, according to the published report, had devised a scam of sorts: they requested forty premium seats to the Bruce Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium through their friends at the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which they intended to buy at $108 per ticket and sell for $1,500 each.   

More from PolitickerNJ.com:
Round One: Torricelli on The (Bergen) Record
Round Two: Doblin takes on Torricelli