As the daughter, directly, of an economist and, indirectly, of a failed communist country, I’ve been brought up on the belief that more competition is better. And so it was a bit of a surprise to me recently when I found myself wondering whether there’s a ceiling to that notion.
But here’s how the argument, which I’m still bouncing around in my head, goes: certainly, competition, especially in the news business, has many pluses. I was city hall reporter at a small daily in a city where the only real competition was a paper that came out on Tuesdays and Fridays, and went heavy on the feel-good community stories as well as on city hall. I certainly noticed my editors were more aggressive in assigning stories for our Tuesday and Friday papers, for fear of being scooped. Good so far.
But it seems we might be at a point where competition is hurting. The quality of news has, arguably, been improving over the last several decades. We’re at a point now, though, where papers are cutting staff, reducing foreign budgets, cutting down on investigative reporting. And it’s all because there’s too much competition. With hundreds of news organizations offering news free online as well as attractive places to advertise, the market seems to have simply fragmented beyond the point where any one organization is able to deliver quality. The audience still exists — it’s just that it has zillions of places to go for what it wants.
It’s a hard argument to make. I went to journalism school in Vancouver, a city where the two dailies, many of the weeklies and one of the television stations were all owned by the same company. People — not just journalism students — were worried, reasonably, about what this meant for their understanding of the world.
But maybe it’s time to take a little step back and try to understand how much competition helps, and how much hurts.