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.