On most weekday mornings for a year or so in the early 1970s, my then-wife, who did the television news on the local cable station, the news guy from the radio station, and I, would get together at the Kankakee, Ill., fire station for our morning coffee.
While we were there one or all of us would go over to the police station and go through the previous night's police reports. We would then, pretty much, decide what was and wasn't news.
I point this out because, although owned by different corporate entities, the three media outlets in that town were controlled by the same family, right before laws were passed to limit that kind of thing - the kind of laws the FCC is now ready to throw out in a move I think is ill-advised.
It is important to note that the owners of the radio station, cable network and newspaper didn't, as far as I could see, use their ownership illegally or even unfairly, except for one time when a politically sensitive major news story went unreported by all three outlets.
But my point, and in a microcosmic sort of way the point of the current flap about deregulating media ownership, is that a handful of people should never be in a position to decide what news the people in a city - or nation - will see and hear, whether they are sitting in a fire station break room or in a corporate board room.
It was only the police and fire news, and sometimes city politics, that got treated that way, but some days there wasn't much else.
There wasn't anything really devious going on in our morning meetings. Sometimes, if we had all been at the same party the night before - and we frequently had - the threshold for what was newsworthy might have gotten raised a little so the three of us would have an easier day.
And each of us was required to furnish our counterparts at the other news outlets with carbon copies (remember them?) of our stories as they were written. I often wonder how much the system allowed us to reach a consensus based on mutual reinforcement of our mistakes.
The truth is, we should have worked for separate independent businesses, and we should have been at each other's throats constantly and completely paranoid about what the others were up to. I'll admit, I did discharge the power packs on my wife's video camera a few times (and there was that little Vaseline on the lens incident) and we did sometimes make carbons of bogus stories with things like guys named Bud Weiser getting arrested for being intoxicated, but there was absolutely no competition for news in that city.
One of the first city council meetings I covered in New Port Richey in 1973 was covered by one weekly and three daily newspapers, two radio stations and three television stations jockeying for facts - and the hottest item on the agenda was an ordinance punishing people who let their dogs poop on other people's lawns.
During all the years I was a reporter here on the North Suncoast, I lived in constant fear that some other publication or station would have a story I had missed. My colleague Howard Troxler, who used to work for the competition, tells of a time another Times reporter and I beat him on a major story and he became physically ill on seeing the headline. To be fair, Troxler gave us our share of queasy moments also.
That's how it should be.
Cutthroat competition and a desire to always be first and most thorough with the news can only work to the benefit of the news consuming public.
Opening the door to more massive ownership acquisitions, a trend that has already caused problems in some areas, can only work to the detriment of everyone who works in or patronizes news outlets.
Decisions made by non-news persons with bottom-line concerns in boardrooms halfway across the country will seldom serve the needs of local news consumers.
And as the number of places where news, views and an independent voice about what is going on in the world continues to shrink, so will the credibility of all media sources in general.
Some of our critics are already calling us corporate lapdogs. I despair when I think of the political intentions of a federal agency that apparently wants to make them right.
