Whatever Happened to Competition?   

The list of two-newspaper towns is painfully short. The local paper is apt to be in a partnership with a TV station--if the same company doesn't own them both. The wild card is the Internet.

EL PASO TIMES REPORTER David Crowder was tracking a hot story. Three children of a popular mayoral candidate were speaking out against their own father, one of them calling him "a monster."
Naturally, Crowder was worried about competitors exposing the story first. But not too worried.
El Paso has only one daily paper, its television stations seemed unlikely to tackle the dicey issue, and the nearest big-city daily is 250 miles away in Albuquerque. Given the magnitude of the story, Crowder accelerated into what he called "kind of a hurry-up mode," but he knew that he could, within reason, take his time.
Not so with Jeff Shields, a bureau reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel who covers the ferociously fought-over boom region southwest of Fort Lauderdale. When Shields heard that a Florida Marlins fan was suing because Billy the team mascot had blasted him in the eye with a souvenir T-shirt during a promotional stunt, he shifted into super-hurry-up mode.
Shields quickly set up a face-to-face interview with the fan and his lawyer, and thus found himself sitting in their waiting room when his competitor from the Miami Herald phoned for her interview.
"I did move over a few seats so I could hear better," Shields confided later. "I could hear her questions and his answers, which of course I had no compunction about writing down."
By showing up in person rather than telephoning, Shields believes, he won an all-important competitive edge. Full of detail the competition didn't have (quotes from Billy the Marlin's get-well card to the fan, among others), his story made the next day's local front. It was one medium-size victory in the all-out brawl between the Sun-Sentinel and the Herald, and it sent Shields home feeling closer to his career-building goal: "to clobber the heck out of the competition every day."
Clobbering the heck out of competition is a long-glorified value that has motivated and terrorized reporters for decades. But competition isn't what it once was, and the daily activities of front-line reporters and editors are changing noticeably as a result.
Fewer reporters swarm after local stories. The number of newspapers is declining. Fewer towns have competing papers, and in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Washington, daily papers are even buying up the pesky suburban publications.
Even more interesting, some papers now own TV stations in their own markets and many others have "partnerships" with one-time rival broadcasters. What used to be a death struggle with television sometimes turns into a collaboration of two foes now facing similar audience defections.
The bottom line is that hot rivalries like South Florida dwindle. Less-competitive places like El Paso become the norm.
El Paso higher education reporter Tammy Fonce-Olivas, for example, remembers when the city had two papers sharing a building, and reporters would look up to see their competitors literally running out to breaking stories. "We wouldn't think twice," she recalls. "We would grab a notebook and head down the stairs. We would notice if we were a minute or two, or a car length or two, ahead of the other paper. Now we're not as prone to run out the door."
"There is a big psychological impact," agrees El Paso Managing Editor Robert Moore. "That sort of inspiration or fear just doesn't exist much anymore."
The consequence can be a softening of journalistic muscle tissue, an idling when the engine should race. But there is also a liberating effect on newsrooms that can worry more about doing news right than jousting over every daily beat story.
An AJR look at several newsrooms and online sites, plus talks with news executives and rank-and-file newspeople across the country, found numerous trends in the way competition now plays out.
Newsrooms seem more laid back, with less sense of urgency and intensity.
Reporters feel less pressure to hurry stories into the next day's paper, a development that allows for more thoughtfulness but at a cost in edge.
Emphasis is shifting from being first to being smart, from papers' reacting and over-reacting in the face of competition to developing their own measured agendas for coverage.
Many newspapers are increasingly writing off local TV news as a serious threat, treating local stations instead as potential partners who can help spread the newspapers' brand name to new and bigger audiences.
Motivating the troops can be harder, especially when it comes to younger journalists not steeped in the traditional juices of rivalry.
And online journalism is the current wild card, portending a new, potentially more intense internal competition, a drive to find and post news fast not because competitors will beat you but because the audience will demand it.
Clearly the competitive spirit isn't gone, in El Paso or anywhere else. Journalists are bred to be aggressive. But many long-timers agree that the culture is being transformed.
"In the 40 years I have been doing this, it's dramatically changed," says Michael Waller, publisher of the Baltimore Sun. "What you had then and what you have a lot less of today is the sense of urgency.... Some journalists have it inherently. But it is becoming more of a personal trait than a collective trait of the organization."

THE 10'OCLOCK NEWS meeting opens one morning in El Paso, and a roomful of editors begin the familiar ritual of grading the day's edition. But something is missing: evidence of competitors' work.
Unlike the case in many other newsrooms, El Paso has no pages from other papers posted on the wall. El Paso was the last city in Texas with competing newspaper ownership, but that ended with the Herald-Post's demise in 1997.
There are not even any regional dailies close enough to spark a rivalry. Isolated at the westernmost tip of Texas, El Paso is more than 250 miles from Albuquerque and nearly 650 miles from Dallas.
While the critique during the news meeting seems lively and tough-minded, no one ever mentions any outside rival.
Still, it becomes clear that the Times indeed does see itself in a contest, but one based largely on standards the paper and its Gannett owners set.
A chart at the front of the room lists key coverage goals. Some are topical (education, crime and crime prevention, growth and traffic). Some are geographic (coverage of the city's east side, of nearby New Mexico). Some are professional (attention to women, diversity, First Amendment issues). The editors systematically check off which goals they met and where they failed.
Valerie Edgren, a copy editor and page designer, cautions against equating lack of competition with laziness. "They have high standards here," she says. "If you don't meet those standards every day with every layout, they make you redo it. Because Gannett is looking over our shoulder, we're constantly being graded."
If today's journalists are redefining what competition means, El Paso is a good place to study. It has five TV news operations, a feisty weekly and even a Web site covering local government. But the Times (about 75,000 circulation daily, 95,000 on Sundays in a county of 680,000) and its 70-person newsroom undeniably dominate the market, so much so that Metro Editor Dan Williams says the paper is "getting by" with fewer reporters now than it had in more competitive days.
There is rampant ambivalence in the newsroom about what the new era means for readers and journalists alike. The ambivalence starts at the top, with Editor Don Flores, who on one level bristles at the idea that the Times lacks competition. "Our competition as we see it is any forum that carries news or information," Flores maintains. "It is competition for readership and competition for advertising dollars."
But Flores also says that at least once a week he "visits with" a section editor, challenging a decision to hold a story. He contrasts El Paso's relatively laid-back newsroom with his formative days as a city editor in Abilene and Dallas, where he faced head-to-head rivalry day after day.
"The paper would hit your doorstep, and you would get it with a cup of coffee in your hand, and you were scared shitless," he remembers. "Did they have something you didn't? I could go to a reporter or photographer and say, ŒHow could they have this when we don't?' There was a clear measuring standard. No one likes to lose. No one likes to come in second....
"It's like Sherman--that's how a city editor should work. You burn everything. You don't leave anything for the next day. You don't hold anything. Nowadays, it's a little tougher. An editor could get complacent."
Yet some stories do get held. Police reporter Louie Gilot cites one story involving allegations of local police brutality, which she says sat for several weeks. It eventually saw print, she says, when Flores learned about it and pressed for publication. If El Paso had another daily, she says, "I think I would feel more pressure from my bosses to deliver stories."
David Crowder's mayor's-race story provides another example. The general idea, that the candidate might have some residual political problems from his divorce years earlier, had been "floating around" for several weeks. As it became clear that the children had decided to speak out against their father, Crowder did a first interview and then, a week or so later, launched himself full-throttle at the story, aiming for Sunday publication. The story didn't run until the following Tuesday, Crowder says, so the paper could consider late concerns raised by an attorney for someone in the story.
"If we had had real competition," Crowder said later, "we would have gotten that sucker out there and played it big."
Reporters know they must fight complacency. "There's simply no competition to speak of," Crowder says. "TV is so shallow, especially on a beat like City Hall, where the meat and potatoes is in the details. When there is a competitor, you compete for your newspaper in the horse race, to stay ahead, to get things they don't have. When there's only one horse in the race, you're going to win--even if you walk."
El Paso's newsroom is full of people who once worked for the competing Herald-Post and remember experiencing what Crowder calls "a friction...that other side to rub up against."
Times columnist Charles Edgren, who spent 17 years at the Herald-Post, is blunt. "In the drive to get stories, to be first with stories, to break them, I think having competition is essential. Consequently, I think some stories are either not reported, underplayed or not pursued at all now."
In a policy change that is controversial within its own newsroom, the Times has converted from free news obituaries to paid classified-ad obits. "Had there been two papers," says Edgren, who is Valerie Edgren's husband, "had there been competition, I'm not sure that decision would have been made. The other paper would have promoted free obits."
Photo Editor Ruben Ramirez, a lifelong El Paso resident who spent 22 years at the Herald-Post, laments its loss, and says that the surviving paper spends less on travel and aggressive coverage than in the old days of competition.
"There doesn't seem to be that urgency that we had before," he says. "When both newspapers were around, there was a lot more hard-hitting news on a daily basis.... I think we're doing a major disservice to the community."
"Any time you have fewer reporters mining resources in a community, you're going to turn up fewer nuggets," echoes Managing Editor Robert Moore.
But Moore and almost everyone else interviewed in El Paso stressed another point: that competition can breed haste and oversimplification. Instead of rushing stories into the paper ahead of a rival, today's Times can move a little slower and produce more complete and thoughtful coverage through what Moore calls "a more deliberative process."
Metro Editor Williams appreciates that flexibility. "When the Herald-Post was operating as our competition," Williams says, "we covered stories a lot differently--piece by piece, day by day. Now we are more apt to want to try and tell it all at once."
Williams recognizes that "it is a little more difficult to motivate people" in today's environment. "That spark of competition lights a fire under just about every reporter."
Like many others, he thinks the oncoming Internet era may reignite some sparks.
Roy Ortega, the paper's multimedia editor, is leading an effort to make sure its Web site is updated multiple times a day. The Internet, he says, "is making everyone in the newsroom a lot more aware that people want to know what's going on right now. They don't want to wait until 5 o'clock. They want it now."
For today's editors, fueling the competitive spirit may get harder and harder. Many young reporters, says Williams, "don't have the fire in the belly we used to have. You have to keep giving reporters challenges, and talk to them every day, and keep their spirits up. And occasionally you have to go kick their butts."

IT WAS THE END OF ANOTHER long day at the office when Joe Jennings, South Broward metro editor for South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, heard a tip about a double murder. "I had four reporters left in the newsroom," Jennings says, "and I sent three of them. I've learned to overreact rather than underreact."
Just a few miles down the road, Rick Hirsch, the Miami Herald's Broward managing editor, tells a similar story, in almost the same words. A report comes in of a prominent murder in Broward County. Editors make reporters drop what they're doing, put projects and features on hold, and chase the news. "We threw everything we could at the story," Hirsch recalls proudly. "We killed [the Sun-Sentinel] on the story. My philosophy is you never underreact to a breaking news story."
If El Paso represents New Competition, then South Florida remains gleefully stuck in the Gunfight Age. Every day the Sun-Sentinel, owned by Tribune Co., and the Herald, a Knight Ridder paper, face off and shoot it out. They're often battling not only each other but the Palm Beach Post, a half dozen aggressive TV stations and even national and international reporters posted to the newsy South Florida region (think of Elián González and presidential vote counting).
A few days in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom make it clear that old-time rivalry blazes on. "You can't lose to the Herald. You just can't," says Sun-Sentinel reporter John Holland. "It's that simple."
"Do I get upset when I see they've beaten us on a story?" asks Editor Earl Maucker, a normally laid-back man suddenly working himself into a fever. "Of course I do." He leans forward and begins to talk slowly, "I do not like it. We should own this market."
Maucker works out of the Sun-Sentinel tower, with its commanding view overlooking Fort Lauderdale's downtown Riverwalk. Like the Pentagon, it is a fortress removed from the main battlefield. Nowadays, the contested front lies southwest of the city, in a part of the county where growth burgeoned after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and where the Herald has invaded in force. Both papers now operate from highly visible new bureaus along the humming I-75 corridor. "This," says the Herald's Hirsch, "is the war zone."
It was from the Sun-Sentinel's South Broward bureau that reporter Jeff Shields worked his story on Billy the Marlin and the litigious baseball fan. It is no secret at the Sun-Sentinel, Shields says, that beating the Herald "will raise you through the ranks as a beat reporter."
Shields came to Florida last year from a noncompetitive market in New York. "It was somewhat deadening," he says. "Here you feel more accountable and more on your toes. Your blood surges.... When I first got here I was actually losing sleep over it."
The rivalry influences everything from news judgment to presentation to reporting to resources to the overall newsroom culture.
News judgment: Like most papers, the Herald and Sun-Sentinel fight for their share of big stories and takeouts, but they also scrap nearly as hard for the "local-local" neighborhood tidbits.
"We find you have to compete on three different levels," says Jennings, the South Broward metro editor. "You compete on the daily level, as we always have. You compete at an enterprise level, which is not anything new either. The new element is that you compete at the community level, the local stuff that might not have made the daily paper before."
Hirsch, the Miami Herald's Broward managing editor, agrees. "There's a big battle for refrigerator news," he says. "The Herald and the Sentinel battle over Little League results."
Presentation: The two papers also duel over who will have the most alluring A1 "window" in the news racks each day. In their afternoon news meetings, Sun-Sentinel editors employ the unusual practice of voting for page-one candidates. One day, for example, the editors quickly tallied a consensus vote for three front-page items, but several stories tied for the fourth slot. Guiding the group toward its decision, Maucker stressed competitive considerations.
"We won't put something out front just because our competition will have it," says Assistant News Editor Irvin Harrell, who was running the A1 meeting that day. "But priority goes of course to stories that are competitive. Do we need to get it out there now? Are we going to get our pockets picked if we don't put it out there?"
Graphics Director Don Wittekind manages a 10-person Sun-Sentinel infographics staff, which he says was reorganized "for competitive reasons" a few years back. The goal: quick turnaround on high-quality, high-impact graphics. "I love trying to predict what they're going to do and make sure we can go further," Wittekind says.
Reporting and writing: Watch Shannon O'Boye in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom, and you see perpetual motion. She's on the phone, huddling with an editor, back to the phone, rushing out a door. She covers, not surprisingly, night cops, one of the most competitive beats in one of the most competitive markets in journalism. "Competition motivates me. It drives me," she says, slightly breathlessly. "I always see the Herald. I also see the TV stations. I do my best to run circles around them.
"Let's say some kid drowns. You have to be delicate about it, but you want to get the mom. You want to get the pictures of the kid.
"I definitely want to get the mom."
Business Editor Gail DeGeorge reels off several ways that competition affects her section: She produces fewer planned-in-advance themed pages than some papers do, because she needs maximum space and flexibility; she has changed procedures to make sure sources are checked as late as possible and tips are routed immediately to reporters; she often pulls reporters off enterprise stories, knowing that "because of the competition...things can't wait."
DeGeorge remembers getting a late-in-the-day tip that a local rental-car company was laying off employees. The anonymous tip could have waited a day, but DeGeorge chose to keep a reporter after hours to chase it. "This was a story in my backyard, and I didn't want to read it in the Miami Herald," she explains.
John Holland, who has covered courts from Fort Lauderdale and government from the South Broward bureau and who has been involved in his share of controversial stories, says reporters must play defense as well as offense. "I have a half dozen sources at the courthouse who will pick up the phone and call me if the Herald is nosing around," he says.
But DeGeorge and others acknowledge that this all-hustle, all-the-time approach can backfire. DeGeorge says not enough time gets spent on enterprise. Several reporters complain that their writing suffers because of the push to publish.
Brittany Wallman, who in three years at the Sun-Sentinel has done both bureau coverage and the City Hall beat, sees upsides and downsides. When she and a Herald competitor both covered the city of Sunrise, Wallman remembers, "My boss looked at the Herald every day and if there was a story the Herald had, no matter how minor, you had to feel guilty about it. If I knew the Herald was working on something, I had to drop other things, stay late, do whatever it took to get it in the paper.... I've been told [by a previous boss], 'I don't care if it's a press release, if the Herald has it, we want it.' I think that's stupid. It can distract you from the important things on your beat."
Life was just as stressful for Wallman's competitor. "If there was anything going on, we were both busting our asses to get it. She told me that when she would come into the office every morning, her editor would have made copies of any stories I had written and put them on her desk to greet her."
In the long run, Wallman concludes, competition "is definitely more fun. There's more adrenaline flowing through the newsroom. The morale here is great."
Newsroom culture: One big morale-booster is that competition often translates into money. "If you're trying to get resources, being in a competitive market helps," says Kathy Trumbull, a former deputy managing editor who is now the paper's director of strategic areas as well as general manager for the South Broward bureau.
For instance, according to Assistant Sports Editor Tom Christensen, knowing the Herald lurks nearby inspires the Sun-Sentinel to staff more national sports events. "Budget-wise," Christensen says, "we can get resources.... When you see the competition is going to be there, it helps your cause."
Competition pervades the culture in less material ways, too. "When I first interviewed for the job," recalls reporter O'Boye, "everybody I interviewed with talked about the competition and how exciting it was."
From the publisher down, however, Sun-Sentinel executives insist that competition alone doesn't drive the newsroom. "What I focus on," says Publisher Robert Gremillion, "is how to make this newspaper more pertinent to people's lives."
Some call it working smarter, not merely faster. "Competition can be looked at on a higher level," explains General Manager Susan Hunt. "Is it worth doing this for the people? Are they going to care?"
This more strategic way of thinking shows up especially in the paper's close relationship with one-time competitors in broadcasting. Like more and more papers these days, the Sun-Sentinel has partnerships--with a local CBS affiliate, an NBC affiliate and a local NPR radio station, among others. A Miami TV station actually has its Broward bureau in the Sun-Sentinel newsroom. And the newsroom also includes a broadcast stage and two production studios, where content is developed for broadcast.
Wasn't it television and radio that were going to kill newspapers?
"I don't really consider them competition in that old-school way," Maucker stresses. "They reach a different kind of audience with a different kind of news.... My ultimate goal is to get people to feel and understand that the premier provider of information in this market is the Sun-Sentinel, including when they see it on TV, read it online or hear it on the radio."
Publisher Gremillion, a former TV executive himself, seconds the point. "I don't believe people are watching TV as a substitute for reading the newspaper.... If I'm helping to make Channel 4 news stronger because they're using content that is gathered by our 300-plus news staff, what I would say is that the content, with our brand burned onto it, gives us an advantage. It gives people who don't read the newspaper access to the Sun-Sentinel brand and promotes it over a very powerful media channel."
Convergence rides high in this strategy, too, of course. The paper runs an active Web site and, like many others, is moving to more frequent updates, often asking reporters to call in material to a "rewrite" producer who quickly posts it.
In a way, the Sun-Sentinel aims to be everything from a multimedia information machine to an old-time kick-'em-in-the-shins prizefighter. It seems clear that the competitive market stokes both aspirations.
"Your goal," says bureau editor Joe Jennings, "is to drive the Herald out of South Broward. But if we ever succeeded, it wouldn't be good for the Sun-Sentinel."
Or for anyone else. As Day City Editor Bruce Kestin puts it, "The real winners in a competitive market are, of course, the readers."

IT'S AN EARLY SPRING weekend, and John J. Jordan, content manager for the award-winning Web site run by Raleigh's News & Observer, is giving an interview by cell phone, when suddenly news intervenes.
Jordan is overseeing his site's online coverage of the ACC basketball tournament--the equivalent, in his region, of a holy rapture. With one second left Duke scores the winning basket in a spine-jangling battle with Maryland.
"Game's over," Jordan shouts into the phone. "I've got to go."
Online, deadlines come every second. Competition between newspapers may be diminishing. The AP and UPI wire services may no longer slug it out. Even the print-broadcast rivalry looks tattered. But on the Web, a renewed competitive frenzy has broken out.
"This is a completely different environment," says Mark Choate, director of new media for the News & Observer. "It is something measured in minutes."
For the ACC tournament, the News & Observer Web site deployed its own team, seven writers, editors and producers including online sports producer Wayne McPeters. Using his laptop, McPeters could post brief stories within five minutes of a game's conclusion, then update them within half an hour with a writer's fuller version. Audio feeds, photo packages and commentary soon followed.
As such real-time coverage emerges online, it is redefining the idea of competition. The paper's site--www.newsobserver.com--competes against at least three strong local sites (one run by a TV station, one by a nearby daily paper and one largely devoted to local entertainment coverage), not to mention national news and sports sites. Even more, perhaps, it competes against the knowledge that reader/viewers increasingly expect immediacy.
This looks like the competition of the future--the drive to be first as well as best, to beat the clock as well as the rival reporter, to catch consumers through every medium imaginable, online, on air, on paper.
Achieving these ambitious goals, however, requires reeducating and reorganizing newsrooms, where change can be painful. New times are forcing an uneasy alliance between print veterans and electronic insurgents.
"Our whole training has been to think in terms of the next day's paper," says News & Observer Managing Editor Melanie Sill. "It is hard to change overnight. It's not resistance, it's just a change in our way of thinking."
In Raleigh, sports seems a good meeting ground and starting point.
"When you're dealing with a big organization like a newsroom, you have to go with what works," Jordan says, pointing out that sports content is the best-read material on its site.
Dane Huffman, assistant sports editor for the printed N&O, agrees. Huffman has taken the lead in working with the Web site, largely for competitive reasons. "We want to kick butt on the ACC," Huffman says. "We can look at the Web as another edition."
Raleigh's site was named "best overall U.S. newspaper online service" for its circulation class this year in a competition sponsored by Editor & Publisher. The paper was one of the first to commit to serious online operations.
News production manager Bob Brueckner attributes this year's award to the site's local initiatives. "We're not just shoveling wire copy. With our database work, some of our series, we try to go beyond text. We're adding multimedia, especially in sports. I think the key is our local emphasis."
In a typical day the site's producers will both transmit what the print newsroom provides and generate their own Web contributions.
One recent day began with producer McPeters representing the Web site in the N&O's 10 a.m. budget huddle in the middle of the newsroom. McPeters listened and took notes as Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, Managing Editor Sill and other editors listed their plans for the day. Toward the end of the meeting, McPeters named several items the Web site would like to see, and he asked if the sports department could supply early material from a local coach's noon press briefing. Huffman, representing sports at the morning meeting, readily agreed.
Then McPeters returned to the Web newsroom. There at around 11 a.m. Jordan, who is in effect the Web site's editor in chief, led a planning session for the day. Based on the newsroom budget, the Web site's own plans and what McPeters had learned, the producers agreed on four or five local stories to spotlight.
From there, the producers scattered to their own small cubicles. Most producers work from laptops, allowing them easy, direct access to Web-production software. Each producer has a specialty--McPeters' is sports, for example--but they also take turns on the "homepage watch," monitoring the Web site, updating several national and international items an hour, rearranging the page as developments require.
Unlike some papers that make one or two scheduled updates to their sites, newsobserver.com is constantly changing. Jordan says research indicates that many users visit the site several times a day.
Besides following the daily news, the producers generate original material. Two programmers, for example, specialize in database projects such as guides to political contributions or Census data.
Community coordinator Monty Hobbs conducts two-way forums for the site and also supervises a section in which more than 2,300 local groups can post calendar items and other features. Hobbs calls himself "part journalist, part party host" and believes that helping people have fun should be a Web priority.
Hobbs recognizes differences between traditional news thinking and Web thinking. He cites an incident from last year, where a local radio station strapped a naked man to a sports utility vehicle and drove around town protesting gasoline prices until police intervened. The newspaper, shying away from the stunt, played it as a brief. But the Web site sprang into the game.
Hobbs posted a forum question, "When does humor turn into a real disruption and a cost to the taxpayers?" The question drew more than 300 responses, Hobbs says, landing it in the site's all-time top five in popularity.
News culture does differ from online culture, and for that reason and others, the integration of the Web into newsrooms has been bumpy, industrywide and even at award-winning sites like the News & Observer's.
In Raleigh, for example, the Web crew isn't in the newsroom. Jordan and his eight producers occupy a cluttered warren of offices in a nondescript building around the corner from the main N&O building. Not only that, but they report through Mark Choate to the paper's publisher, not to its editor (though Jordan is considered a member of the newsroom management team).
Jordan, as content manager, concedes there can be problems with "fiefdoms" and "issues of control." To succeed, he says, "You have to be an evangelist and a diplomat." And you have to be clever. One reason he equips his producers with laptops, for instance, is so they can go into the newsroom, plug in almost anywhere, and be instant Webmasters.
But Jordan and his Web producers make little secret of their desire to be physically closer to the action. "Ultimately we have to have a seat in the newsroom," says news producer Brueckner. "If you don't have a physical presence, it's extremely easy for you to be forgotten."
To a person, however, the producers agreed that communication and cooperation are on the upswing. "The biggest improvement has been the communication we now have with the newsroom," says McPeters. "There is more free-flowing dialogue. Everyone wants their product to be the best, but in the long run you're on the same team."
Sill, the paper's managing editor, says many reporters were converted into Web enthusiasts during the presidential election aftermath, when they found themselves glued to online news venues for the latest word. That period helped confirm her belief that the Internet will help newspapers "get back in the breaking-news business."
"I see online as a great outlet for that," Sill says. "We can be first and be the best."
Jordan, who has been on the new-media side of newspapers since 1993, has his own strategy.
"It's kind of a Maoist-style revolution," he says slyly, "where we have to go up into the hills and build up our forces. When we have critical mass, we can storm the capital. And we're pretty close to that now."

COMPETITION ISN'T WHAT it used to be, and maybe it never was.
Michael Waller has spent four decades in the newspaper business, and he knows competition from every angle. As a young reporter in Decatur, Illinois, he remembers sprinting to cover "something like seven beats," including the local library and college. In Cleveland during the 1960s, his Plain Dealer went one-on-one with the now-defunct Cleveland Press.
"They were going to kick your butt, so you had to get out there and hustle," he remembers.
But Waller, now the publisher of the Baltimore Sun, refuses to romanticize the old-style, super-heated era. "The irony is that even with that sense of urgency and competition, the paper wasn't very good. The mistake people make is to think that the competition itself made a better newspaper. I liked the aspect of competition that helped you motivate. But I never liked the aspect of pushing you into being irresponsible and publishing things before they were ready."
Waller sees today's world as being tougher for journalists. "There's less and less of a competition for news but more and more of a competition for revenue. There's less reporter competition but more in about everything else.
"Twenty years ago, I literally think you could be brain dead and make money in newspapers. Today I think you have to use your brains."
That means working harder to inspire reporters and editors and constantly redefining newspapers' roles. "The definition of news is different in 1970 and 1980 and now," Waller believes. "One of the driving factors is the willingness to be thoughtful in how we define news."
As times change, as ideas about news change, what does it all mean for the notion of competition? As a journalistic value, the rush to be first remains respected, but it no longer obsesses most newsrooms. These days competition means competing for readers, time and revenue more often than beating a rival reporter to a story. On the Internet, competition plays out more through creativity and user-friendliness than raw speed.
At the same time, everyone agrees that competitive fire still has value, and many worry whether it is passing to new generations.
Melvin Mencher, for example, fears that journalism students no longer get the message.
Mencher spent nearly 30 years teaching reporting at Columbia University and is the author of "News Reporting and Writing," a classic textbook now in its eighth edition. Before teaching, he covered the West for the United Press wire service, where "if we were two minutes late on a big story, we got what was called a torpedo from headquarters."
Once the adage "get it first and get it right" prevailed in journalism classes. Now, Mencher says, "I don't think speed means as much.... There's no question that competition is not a big factor in teaching."
Carole Rich, author of the similarly successful "Writing and Reporting News: A Coaching Method" (and once an intensely competitive beat reporter), also sees a shift away from teaching about old-style competition. "Would I do a separate chapter on how it used to be? Absolutely not," says Rich, now in the process of revising her textbook. Instead, she sees students learning about "competing in terms of time"--reporting, writing and posting efficiently in various media, regardless of whether other reporters are on the story.
Though head-to-head rivalry may be waning, Phil Currie, senior vice president/news for Gannett, detects "a new excitement" in journalism. Newsrooms are pumped up about the multimedia courtship of readers, he says, and the challenge to be both faster reporters and better storytellers.

SOMETIMES, EVEN IN A so-called noncompetitive one-paper town, competitiveness just boils down to the gritty bulldoggedness of one journalist on a mission.
Take the case of El Paso Times senior photographer Rudy Gutierrez. He was assigned to photograph First Lady Laura Bush, visiting the city for a memorial service for acclaimed Western artist Tom Lea, who died in January. When Gutierrez staked out territory near the Lea family home, the Secret Service ordered him to move out of camera range. Gutierrez protested that he was in the street on public property. The Secret Service ordered him back anyway.
So he called Times Managing Editor Robert Moore, who suggested that Gutierrez ask a neighbor for permission to take pictures from private property. The neighbor at first agreed, but backed off when a police officer showed up and protested. Gutierrez was exiled to a point too far even for his long-range lens.
Gutierrez called Moore back. The managing editor and the newspaper's lawyer hopped into a car and sped to the scene, hoping that "some show of strength might bolster Rudy's cause."
When they arrived, Moore sought out Gutierrez. Side by side, the managing editor and photographer marched slowly, step by step, back into camera range, hoping not to provoke the police. "We walked real slow. We inched our way," Gutierrez says. "I was going to do everything I could to get the picture."
When Mrs. Bush's motorcade arrived, the photographer stood ready.
"The result," Moore says proudly, "was the only photo, still or video, taken of the First Lady during her visit. It took a photographer, managing editor and lawyer to get it. But it was worth the effort."