TV Station Competition: Friend or Foe?

I've read countless articles about TV network competition -- the inherent rivalry between ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. And then there are the cable stations -- MSNBC, FOX News, CNN. Between ratings, viewership, and content, it's clear that people have a lot to say about how each station conducts its news programming. And if these networks are constantly vying for attention, there's no way the people who work at these stations could possibly get along, right?

Well, that's questionable.

That may be the case in large market likes NYC (market #1) or LA (market #2) , where a high concentration of viewers makes the competition more intense, but from what I've seen, this isn't necessarily the case in small markets.

For instance, I work for YNN (Your News Now), a 24-hours cable news network featuring local news from the Central New York/Southern Tier/Northern Country area. I work in the Elmira-Corning bureau (market #176), where we compete with WETM (the local NBC affiliate) and WENY (the local ABC affiliate).

In the five weeks I've been here, I've made friends with people from both WETM and WENY. Since we all cover the same stories, we inevitably run into each other, and over time, those run-ins turn into friendships. I exchange phone numbers with reporters from the other stations and hang out with them when I'm not working.

Needless to say, in a small market, in which the reporters are generally young, fresh, and still very much in the learning stages of the industry, the competition is not so much "competition," but more of a friend. We understand each other by understanding the nature of our jobs. For reporting newbies like us, sometimes it's more important that we report on the most newsworthy events rather than worry about our stations' ratings.