Mary Katharine Ham: Competition is good for mainstream media

I grew up in a cross-town newspaper battle — one of the few left in a news climate where chains had bought most major dailies and many markets had become monopolies. I learned early that two newspapers fighting for scoops and readers meant that readers got better news coverage than they would have gotten if they were served by one paper.

I know because I watched both papers grow. We got the competition’s newspaper delivered to our house for opposition research.

I loved newspapers. I loved the dusky marks onmy fingers that proved I had spent the morning educating myself. I loved the elevator in the old downtown building that carried us from the roar of the press room floor up to the quiet buzz of the newsroom.

It had a metallic smell, and a reddish carpet blotched with ink, and looked, for all the world, like a giant ink pad to a 7-year-old. I loved being just one of 11 newspaper majors at my college, immersing myself in the age-old art of newsgathering.

After college, I covered news for a couple of years. There were things I loved and hated about it. I loved hard deadlines, watching sports for a living, writing every day, learning all about a new town, meeting its people and learning its quirks.

I hated that the first-ever AP seminar I went to included a long discussion on when to change quotes, accounting for the political position, race and economic status of your subject. I was just waiting for someone to pull out some sort of slide-rule of political correctitude to help us make such decisions.

I hated that one of the young reporters at the seminar lamented working in rural North Carolina and asked, unabashedly, “What do you do when the people you cover are just, like, stupid?”

It was this contempt the press has for its subjects and its readers that really turned me off. That contempt, in my experience, is amplified when reporters are dealing with political conservatives, but it tends to extend to everyone who’s not a trained journalist.

I decided to give up newspapers when I started thinking of blogs and conservative media as just another competitor to the Mainstream Media. I don’t have to be the mortal enemy of the papers I grew up with. Sure, they do stupid things, and I love to call them out for it just as they love to call out bloggers, but the truth is that blogs have the ability to push newspapers and other mainstream media to be better.

I need the foreign bureaus and the years of experience embodied by an MSM news organization in order to be a decent blogger. I see the virtues of the MSM despite its many gaffes. After spending half my career in the newsroom and the other in my pajamas, as is the blogger custom, I know that if more members of the MSM did the same, we’d all end up with better products.

There is a reason the competition newspaper landed on our doorstep every day growing up. It thumped against the stoop next to “our” newspaper, weighty with ideas that could be used and tweaked in competition against it.

Blogs have been creeping up the stairs and knocking on the MSM’s door for years now. Some in the MSM have noticed and listened.

During Hurricane Katrina, when many newsrooms went underwater, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Sun-Herald in Biloxi relied on e-mailed and phoned-in stories and photos from citizen journalists to get the story.

In a crisis situation, both papers realized the value in using their readers’ vast stores of knowledge to inform their coverage. They were not trained journalists, but contempt floated out the window along with the editor’s Swingline.

I grew up watching two newspapers push each other to be better. I wanted to be a part of that, and I am. I’m just pushing from the outside now. But every once in a while, it’s nice to get a little ink on my hands again.

Mary Katharine Ham is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at HughHewitt.com