Beating the big city daily

Since the demise of the #2 daily newspaper in Houston back in '95, the popular notion was that news consumers would suffer with only one daily paper chasing down the news.

That is true, we believe, but only to a degree.

We've noticed recently that just cause The Chron is the only daily paper in Houston, it still gets beat to the punch by the little local freebie weeklies.

Case in point: The Examiner News that covers West University, Bellaire, River Oaks and Memorial.

The weekly, a recent acquisition of Houston Community Newspapers, employs, for the most part, young journalists freshly minted from academia who don't make much money and usually could use a shoe shine. They are so new to the business, they have yet to become disillusioned and jaded and hopelessly depressed like their older brethren.

Moreover, even though they only publish once-a-week, they still whup up on the big-swinging-weenie Chronicle on a fairly regular basis.

Here are two examples, carefully documented by our research staff:

On April 18, the Chron published a story about the Center for Hearing and Speech being worried about losing its space in light of Mayor Bill White's move to oust the group that serves the mentally retarded. [link]

The Ex had that story on April 12. [link]

On April 18, the Chron covered the ongoing protests on the SW Frwy bridges.
[link]

The Ex had that story on March 28 and Oct. 12.
[link]

(Editor's note: The link to the Oct. 12 article is not included cause it'll cost you money to access it, and we realize most of you don't want to see it that much, but it's a meatier story than the Ex's blurb update on March 28.)

What's the point of this?

It's not to bash The Chron, where a number of very talented people are employed, some of whom are friends of ours (we think, but maybe not.)

Chasing the news previously published by other periodicals is part of the business, even if the news operation that beats you on a story is teeny tiny and underfunded compared with the huge, well-oiled (and yet managerial dysfunctional) big boy in town.

So we'll end by just saying keep up the good work to the Examiner News and all the other smaller papers in the Petrochemical Underarm (and elsewhere) that manage to keep alive the spirit of competition in the ever-shrinking and monopolized newspaper business. Without you, the big city dailies would be even more lazy than they are now.

Furthermore, let's all resolve to support the smaller publications with our patronage (free!) and, when applicable, with our advertising dollars (not free but much more reasonable price-wise than the big, self-proclaimed "Leading Information Sources.")

That is all.