You don’t want the news to be a zero sum game

There’s plenty of room for every organization that works to actually gather and deliver the news.

Delivering the news is not a zero sum game.

No thriving democracy can afford to have only one or two news outlets whether controlled by the government or not.

Only people on the business side of publications argue to edge out the competition. They think it means more ad dollars, which is another argument for another time.

What a democracy needs are news organizations competing with one another to get the most reliable news out there. The pressure of getting scooped or just having stories bested by another harder working set of reporters is necessary to the highest quality news getting to the readers.

In spite of thinly veiled suggestions by big, corporate-owned newspapers and television, reliability of news comes from the disciplined process of gathering and delivering it, not the size of the outlet.

Most of us would agree that there is no place for dummy sites set up to work Facebook’s many sorry weaknesses with news-looking fiction.

And opinion blogs serve a useful purpose of persuasion and argument.

But a democracy always needs more news outlets that actually get out on the street, interview real people, work sources and document events with photography.

That’s our wheelhouse at Free Press.

It’s the discipline of reporting and the accumulated record of delivering reliably-sourced news that establishes a news organization, not how wealthy its owner.

It may just be in the future that the news is delivered more and more by an increasingly larger pool of small news outfits that in the end deliver more and more reliable news than the old corporate behemoths of old.

At Free Press we are eager to compete with other news outlets because it makes us better.

This is no zero sum game.

Author Profile

Founder, publisher, and editor of Oklahoma City Free Press. Brett continues to contribute reports and photography to this site as he runs the business.