By David Abel | Jan. 3, 2016
The newly
bought flashlight pierced the darkness, but the number on the house was nowhere
to be seen.
I hopped
out of the warm car and crunched over ice covering the front lawn for a closer
look. I peeked behind the wreath on the door, but it wasn’t there either. So I moved
on to a neighbor’s house, hoping in the cold hours before dawn to find the
right address quickly.
It was just
then, as I plunged over a modest ledge I failed to see by the driveway, that I
began to appreciate the considerable challenges of delivering the newspaper
every morning.
I was one
of scores of reporters, editors, and other employees at the Globe who
volunteered last night to help deliver the Sunday paper, after an unfathomable debacle
involving a new distributer led to thousands of readers failing to receive the
newspaper for much of the past week.
My shift
began shortly before 4 a.m., when Mark Morrow, the editor of the Sunday Globe,
picked me up in his SUV, and we drove to a distribution center in Newton.
When we
arrived, the first person we saw was Sacha Pfeiffer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning
reporter whose work was lauded in the recent film “Spotlight.”
She looked
like she had seen ghosts.
She couldn’t
believe the chaos at the distribution center. Reporters and editors were frantically
stuffing circulars and newspapers into plastic bags, stacking them on stainless
steel carts, and lugging them to their cars, trying to avoid an avalanche of
ink in the windy night.
An official
with the new distribution company, ACI Media Group, was handing out routes, but
most of them were – unhelpfully, to say the least – listed alphabetically,
rather than in a logical order by address.
It felt
like a journalistic apocalypse.
Mark and I received
our route of 125 homes in Jamaica Plain and wheeled our papers to his car, stuffing
them in his trunk.
We struggled
to decipher the code on the route sheet, but it seemed like we were lucky.
Unlike many of our colleagues, ours appeared to be organized by address. We
soon learned that wasn’t quite the case.
For the
next four and half hours, we circled around the neighborhood, returning to the
same streets, again and again. We would deliver a paper to one house on Moss
Hill Road, only to return an hour later to drop one on the porch of a neighbor
a few houses down the street. There appeared to be no logic at all to the
route.
The sheet we
received had other specific directions to follow. Some subscribers requested the
paper inside their screen door, others by a side door. That meant a lot of
climbing icy stairs, a lot of searching in the darkness, a lot of close
encounters with growling dogs.
As I
approached many houses, aiming the high-powered flashlight that Mark had just
bought near their windows, I worried about waking someone up. I worried about being
confused for an intruder. I worried about getting shot.
The more
the night wore on, the more I prayed to the journalism gods that the company
would figure out how to solve the delivery fiasco – soon. I also developed a
deep respect for the men and women who do this for a living and learned how
crucial they are to what we do. Whatever they’re paid, it’s not enough.
After dawn
broke, we met several subscribers and handed them the paper directly.
I gave a
Globe to one man, and he told me: “Nothing is older than a day-old newspaper.”
When Mark
delivered the paper to a woman who opened her door in her pajamas, she said hadn’t
received the paper in about a week. She was astonished to receive the Sunday
Globe from the Sunday editor.
“We’re
trying,” he told her.
As we
prepared to make our final deliveries, we had a few papers left. We approached
a man walking his dogs and offered him a free Globe.
He hadn’t
received it all week, he groused. But he said he didn’t need one now. It had already
arrived on his doorstep.
Globe chief
executive Mike Sheehan said the company delivered all but about 3,000 of the more
than 200,000 newspapers sold on Sundays. He said reporters and editors helped
deliver about 23,000 of them.
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.
