Playing Solo   

Staying aggressive when there's little or no competition.

BACK IN 1985, I directed the coverage of the Walker family spy ring for the Washington Post. This was a bit of a departure, since I was the paper's deputy metro editor, and espionage was a far cry from suburban traffic and Mayor Marion Barry. But the saga had begun with the arrest of the father-and-son team in the Maryland suburbs, and we jumped on it quickly. Even after the story mushroomed into major national news, then-Managing Editor Len Downie, doubtless guided by the Watergate precedent, let me hang on to it.
I remember vividly the night it became clear that this was an even bigger deal than it had seemed. We got a two-paragraph release from the FBI that the brother of Walker père, who like his relatives was in the Navy, had been arrested as well.
We put a bare-bones piece into the first edition, and I sent out a call for reinforcements. Soon Ruth Marcus, the lead reporter on the story, was back in the office, working the phones.
Ruth, who was fresh out of Harvard Law School, is one of the most relentless reporters I've ever met. Before long she was talking to the prosecutor. She pressed him for details, but he was in no-comment mode. He explained that it would all come out in a document to be filed the following morning.
That, of course, wouldn't do us any good in the next day's paper, so Ruth persisted. She traded shamelessly on her Harvard Law background, to no avail. Finally, running out of options, she told the prosecutor that if he read her the document, she'd give him her first-born child.
"I already have two kids," he replied.
"I'll take one," Ruth shot back.
He cracked up, and read her the whole thing. The next day, the Post's off-lead story was a detailed account of the allegations against Arthur Walker. Everyone else had bupkis.
That kind of competitive fire, that determination to get the story whatever the obstacles, is a deeply embedded journalism tradition. Few things have been as sacred as the scoop, the big exclusive.
But the competitive fires may be burning out, judging by Carl Sessions Stepp's excellent article (see "Whatever Happened to Competition?" ). An evolving and vastly different media landscape places a premium on different skills.
Of course, competition remains fierce in some locales, as Carl shows in his look at the Battle of Broward, in which the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel are facing off.
In Washington, D.C., the major national newspapers battle vigorously, as you may have noticed during the Clinton-Lewinsky era.
And in a sense, the media business is more competitive than ever. The advent of myriad Web sites in a huge variety of flavors, the cable news explosion, the seemingly endless supply of new magazines have created a very crowded marketplace. But the competition is for revenue, for people's attention.
What's receding is the old-fashioned mano-a-mano combat for local news.
The number of competitive newspaper markets has shrunk dramatically. There's movement in the other direction in San Francisco and Honolulu, where JOAs have been replaced by fully independent rivals. But that's a blip.
In most places television is completely outgunned by newspapers. Rather than duke it out, papers and TV stations are entering partnerships. In some cities the same company owns both a paper and a station, a trend that will accelerate when the FCC loosens regulations restricting the practice.
And hard to find are Web sites with local news staffs anywhere near the size of a newspaper's.
Lack of competition actually has an upside. In a closely contested newspaper skirmish, no one wants to be beaten. So sometimes stories are rushed into the paper before they're ready. Sometimes a paper will go with a half-baked story simply because the other guys have it.
But competition brings with it something else, something very positive: a sense of urgency. When you're in a death match, you're on high alert at all times, pushing yourself to aggressively find out everything you can. The winners are the readers, who will end up far better informed.
Playing solo can bring complacency. El Paso journalists say that the pursuit of the news there has been far more leisurely since the Texas city became a one-paper town. And being the only game makes it much easier to cut down on staff, newshole and travel--to shortchange readers.
So what's the answer? As is so often the case, leadership. When your foe isn't breathing down your neck, it falls to editors, hard-charging editors, to inspire their staffs to do the pedal-to-the-metal reporting that's so crucial to this wonderful, if frustrating, business.