Staffers at The Record and 2 other dailies owned by Gannett are trying to join union

The Record of Woodland Park and the Hackensack Chronicle, a free weekly that reprints stories and photos from the once-great daily newspaper known far and wide as the Bergen Record.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

HACKENSACK, N.J. -- Employees of The Record of Woodland Park and two other daily newspapers owned by Gannett are seeking recognition of a union after hundreds of them were laid off in recent years.

The other papers are the Daily Record of Morristown and the New Jersey Herald of Newton.

"The three papers represented by members of our union have provided local news to northern New Jersey for more than 100 years," Record reporter Terrence McDonald told the New Jersey Globe.

"In fewer than 5 years, Gannett has turned each into a shadow of their former selves," McDonald told The Globe. 

"We organized to bring more power to the writers, photographers and web producers who are dedicated to providing our communities with the journalism they deserve," he said.

The union effort includes employees of NorthJersey.com, The Record's website, where some stories are labeled "for subscribers" only.

If Gannett turns down the voluntary request, the employees can petition the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election.

No comment

Globe Editor David Wildstein, who was a key figure in the Bridgegate scandal during the Christie administration, reported that Gannett appeared to have "embargoed" coverage of the bid by editorial staffers to unionize.

The Record has covered other bids by private sector employees to form labor unions, including bids by non-Gannett journalists to organize at the Los Angeles Times, Wildstein reported.

Dan Sforza, The Record's executive editor, did not respond to several requests for comment.

72 employees sign

Employees of the 3 newspapers are seeking recognition after "almost 90% of eligible employees -- a total of 66 -- signed on with the NewsGuild of New York," The Globe reported, later amending the total number seeking to unionize to 72.

Those employees posted a mission statement at TheRecordGuild.com, their website (and it appears in full in the comments section at the end of this post).

Previous union attempts

When The Record was headquartered at 150 River St. in Hackensack and owned by the Borg family, several efforts to unionize press room workers were made, but they were unsuccessful.

In the 1980s, a number of reporters also wanted to join the New York Newspaper Guild, but could not reach a consensus.

The Record closed its headquarters in Hackensack in 2009, and moved employees to 1 Garret Mountain Plaza in Woodland Park.

Sale to Gannett

The Borg family sold North Jersey Media Group to Gannett in July 2016 for nearly $40 million in cash.

Stephen A. Borg, who was then the publisher, engineered the biggest downsizing in The Record's history in 2008, targeting veteran employees who were earning high salaries.

He then froze newsroom salaries for several years before the sale.

NJMG published 2 daily newspapers, The Record and Herald News, numerous weekly newspapers and (201) magazine. 

350+ layoffs

By March of 2017, Gannett had laid off more than 350 NJMG employees.

Gannett was acquired by GateHouse Media in 2019, and the company reportedly plans to outsource 485 jobs to India this year.

Ultimately, SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate, owns the equity fund that controls The Record and (201) magazine. 

Stephen Borg and his partners are now building hundreds of luxury apartments on nearly 20 acres of land along River Street after tearing down NJMG's headquarters and a diner in Hackensack.

Read: Shit in driveway wasn't from dog walkers:

 The Record was delivered to us by mistake

Read: Readers turn thumbs down

 on editor who says they must pay for news

Read: The Record and NorthJersey.com

lose thousands of readers 

The Record's onetime HQ on River Street in Hackensack is going, going, almost gone

STOP THE PRESSES: As demolition continued today, the most recognizable part of The Record's former headquarters in Hackensack is this section of a 3-story executive wing fronting on River Street. The wing included offices, a private dining room, a kitchen for the executive chef, a gymnasium and a hallway art gallery.

ELEVATOR TO NOWHERE: The 5-story elevator tower at the rear of the headquarters building also remained standing today. 

THAT EMPTY FEELING: No part of the building at 150 River St. remains standing between the section of the executive wing and the elevator tower.

SEPT. 2, 2018: The executive wing as it appeared in September. The Record closed its headquarters in 2009, relocating to an office building overlooking Route 80 in Woodland Park. Printing of the once-great local daily newspaper was moved to Rockaway Township in 2006.

FOURTH-FLOOR NEWSROOM: The newsroom was on the 4th floor of the headquarters building. The large windows framed the tower of smoke rising from the destruction of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. See a short video of the demolition work, below.

READ: The Borgs are back in Hackensack

READ: Ghosts of The Record

 to be buried under new housing

-- VICTOR E. SASSON

Trump's crazy train or daily D.C. shit show has the world mocking the United States

Graffiti on a building in Mary Ellen Kramer Park at the Great Falls in Paterson.

In N.J., The Record reduces

Bergen County news even further

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

Editor's note: The Celebrity Birthdays feature on Page 6BL in today's Better Living section notes "film producer Harvey Weinstein is 66." I guess even sexual predators deserve a listing. See a reader's comment at the end of this post.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

A cornered President Trump is lashing out again on Twitter at Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a fellow Republican.

Mueller is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, as well as the finances of the Trump Organization, the 500 real estate and business entities of which the president is the sole or principal owner.

Late Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, less than two days shy of McCabe's retirement.

Like fired FBI Director James Comey, McCabe has handed over to Mueller memos documenting his conversations with the president.

Meanwhile, "60 Minutes" plans to air an interview with adult film star Stormy Daniels next Sunday.

She has offered to return $130,000 in hush money she was paid to keep quiet about her affair with Trump in 2006 after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron.

Daily shit show

What a daily shit show Trump is putting on in Washington, D.C., turning our democracy into a laughing stock around the world.

No president has been tarred with so much scandal or has proven to be such a loose cannon -- insulting others and praising himself in an endless stream of lies the news media seem obsessed with spreading around the world.

'A scam ... a fraud'

Also on Friday, The New York Times and The Observer of London reported a voter-profiling company called Cambridge Analytica "harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission...."

"The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump's campaign in 2016."

"This was a scam -- and a fraud," the social network said in a statement.

Editorial cartoonist Kevin Siers of The Charlotte Observer commenting on the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil.

Rick McKee, editorial cartoonist at The Augusta Chronicle, capturing the chaos of the Trump administration.

Many observers are betting the meeting between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will never come off or that the two leaders are so illegitimate, nothing will come of the summit, says editorial cartoonist Nate Beeler of The Columbus Dispatch.

Local news?

I could not find a single local-news story from Bergen County in The Record's Local section on Saturday, with the exception of a police brief on a missing Paramus woman.

This from a local daily newspaper that began life as The Bergen Record, and is still called that by many older readers, decades after it became just The Record.

On Sunday, even Mike Kelly's column on the Opinion front (1O) was about Paterson.

The Record's local-news operation was on life support when the Gannett Co. took over from the Borg family in July 2016, and slashed the payroll of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of daily and weekly papers, and (201) magazine.

Now, residents of the 70 Bergen County communities can go days or weeks without seeing any news of their town.

Legal marijuana?

Gannett's reporting is weakest when trying to predict the future, as James Nash did on Sunday's Page 1.

Nash questioned whether the state Legislature will approve a bill to legalize marijuana by the June 30 deadline, and if it does, whether the state can develop rules by July 1, 2019, when weed would be sold to anyone.

Instead of speculating about the future, why doesn't Nash and other reporters write balanced stories seeking opinions on each side of issues such as legal marijuana, taxing millionaires and so forth.

Bylines

In redesigning The Record's print edition, Gannett eliminated the "by" in reporters' bylines.

Now, a reporter's name appears in boldface type and the publication appears next to it.

But "The Record" has been eliminated in favor of a fictitious publication, "North Jersey Record."

So it's no surprise #gannettruinedmypaper is appearing more and more on social media.