'Unforeseen problem' delays delivery

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"Due to an unforeseen problem, the delivery of today's paper will be late."

That's the message I heard this morning around 8 when I called the 201 number I usually dial if my paper is missing, wet or late (201-646-4444).

Does "unforeseen problem" refer to the depth of the snow that fell  most of Sunday and overnight? A front-page story in The Record of Woodland Park on Sunday predicted a blizzard.

Were there problems with the presses in far-off Rockaway Township? The Mercedes-Benz  trucks that haul the papers back to Bergen County? 

What about the rag-tag crew of independent home deliverers, whose cars and trucks test the limits of the vehicle-inspection regulations?

I remember when my hometown daily newspaper was put together by reporters and editors in a Hackensack newsroom and printed in the same building. Then, the first legible copies -- the so-called good copies -- were rushed upstairs and pored over for typos, bad headlines and other problems, and fixes were made as soon as possible.

 

What a concept.

Hackensack doubts its existence

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Trenton. Edison. Monmouth Beach. Warren Township (wherever the hell that is). Far-off New Jersey place names or datelines appear on Page 1 in The Record of Woodland Park today and with regularity, but when is the last time you saw a Hackensack story there? 

President Obama's offshore drilling plan and its threat to the extraordinary Jersey Shore is squeezed under a one-column headline, when it should be taking up most of the page. Shame on the lazy, incompetence editors for running a sensational, A-1 story on the gang rape of a 7-year-old girl in the state capitol.


Some news editor wrote a "What's next" blurb for the oil-drilling story that refers to Obama's "government," instead of administration. Some news copy editor and supervisor also must have been napping.


In Local today, there is lots of Passaic County news, including police and fire stories, but, for yet another day, nothing about the city where the newspaper was founded in 1895 and where it prospered for more than 110 years, and still nothing about how state aid cuts are going to affect Hackensack schools. The headline on Mike Kelly's column should read, "Ignore this drivel."


My son attends school in Hackensack, and my street has long needed paving. I've been wondering for many months whether the City Council is going to address the police chief's mounting legal troubles and his alleged use of police staff in his business affairs -- the one story clueless head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes has allowed Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado to cover.
 
I've watch Main Street businesses struggle or close -- apparently affected by Publisher Stephen A. Borg's decision to pull hundreds of employees out of the city and move printing to bucolic Rockaway Township, wasting gallon upon gallon of diesel fuel on his Mercedes delivery trucks and worsening North Jersey's already polluted skies.


I am beginning to doubt Hackensack's existence.