Rough-weather Hackensack

Image by pwbaker via Flickr

The Record of Woodland Park is amazingly consistent. Readers can go weeks without seeing a municipal, education, development or any other story about Hackensack, but when a storm hits, the paper's photographers rush here for a weather photo, often featured on Page 1.

And so it is today with drivers-cum-boaters negotiating deep water on the appropriately named River Street, not far from The Record's old headquarters. Six reporters worked on the story, but few words of it refer to events in Hackensack. (Photo: Turnpike across Hackensack River.)

There's nothing in there about litigants, lawyers and jurors scrambling to move their cars away from rising water in the jurors and visitors lot of the Bergen County Courthouse, where a full-time reporter is assigned to the press room. And there's no word on whether the hundreds of new Toyotas being stored in The Record's old lot were damaged by flood waters.

A-1 today keeps the focus on teachers, who are resisting a one-year pay freeze proposed by Governor Christie. Popinjay Alfred P. Doblin, the editorial page editor, has more than once defended Christie's refusal to renew the so-called millionaire's tax, cheering the Borg family, and has claimed that's a job for the Democrats who allowed the levy to lapse on income over $400,000 a year. But Doblin also is bitching and moaning in the paper because his train fare from Clifton might be going up 25%.

The A-1 story on toll takers is of absolutely no interest to driver with E-ZPass. I haven't physically paid a toll or spoken to a toll taker for more than 15 years and my prior experience with them was good, so I don't see what the big deal is.

An embarrassing series of corrections culminated today on A-2 with the paper running the correct photo for an obituary that ran on Tuesday.

The blackout on Hackensack news continues in Local, but you'll find a detailed school budget story about Woodland Park, where North  Jersey Media Group and its two dailies are now headquartered.

Hackensack news -- sort of

Image by wallyg via Flickr

The big photo-and-text element on the front of Local today reports on unruly kids at libraries in three of the 90 or so communities in The Record of Woodland Park's circulation area. So I guess the kids at the Hackensack library are well-behaved.

All 75 libraries in Bergen County are addressed in only a few sentences quoting the executive director of the Cooperative Library System. Now, that's efficient reporting. (Photo: Jersey City Free Public Library.)

On Page 1, we learn NJ Transit tightened security after a suicide bombing hit the Moscow subway. Reading this on the rattling, creaking and groaning local buses in North Jersey, riders undoubtedly wished someone would put them out of their misery.

What do they have to do to get Road Warrior John Cichowski's attention --  set off a bomb?

Given today's biblical deluge, I wonder if the paper will report tomorrow on whether any new Toyotas in the lot of the old headquarters at 150 River St. in Hackensack were damaged by rising flood waters.