In free market capitalism, one concept stands out that is more appeasing to human nature and the entirety of natural selection itself: Market competition. When we look at it from the customers' point of view, we see this as a good thing since it helps to weed out the bad businesses and also makes our wishes heard in the board rooms of even the biggest companies. If a seller of a product or a service tries to sweeten the pot, we, as customers, do benefit from it. However, those who fail simply vanish and go out of business. You might call it the survival of the fittest in the economy. But "the fittest" can sometimes mean the most vicious rather than the best. After all, we have often seen bad companies thriving off of smear campaigns against their competitors and monopolizing their industries with hostile takeovers.In case you are wondering why I started with a concept that feels more at home in our financial pages, it is because instead of trying to cover something as broad as free market competition, I plan to focus on something on a more minor scale. I am talking about the competition we face in the media sector. After the stated ended its monopolization of newspapers, radio and TV channels, we saw the sector shift to privately-owned organizations to the point of no return, thus starting the sector's competition. This competition has many battlegrounds such as news making, profits, ratings, circulation and with the spread of web media, link hits.If we are to compare this competition with other sectors like the automotive one, of course we find that in terms of numbers, media's predicament pales. Robert G. Picard, the man considered by many to be the father of media economics, said the following in his book "The Economics and Financing of Media Companies:" "Many media managers believe their firms face high competition in their product markets, but in reality the competition they face is relatively moderate or low, depending upon their product and location. By comparison to other industries, the degree of competition among media products is not very high because of limited choice."From that quote we can deduce that in terms of numbers, media doesn't face that much competition from each other. But they do face it in terms of their product. More and more, we see the desire to break the news, even minutes before competitors. Many journalists do it by forsaking the necessary fact-checking. On top of that, since we now enjoy the relative easiness of retraction in web media, we see the mentality of "publish first, edit later" becoming more commonplace and acceptable. Another negative effect of media competition is seen when a media organization, in fear of losing their audience base, tends to treat them as customers in a restaurant by servicing them the news they want to read, the way they want to read it. This is a counterproductive action since it also serves to alienate readers who seek credibility. And if you are a media organization aiming to grow via hard-earned credibility, there are very few things worse than getting caught spoon feeding the readers. Another problem media in Turkey especially suffers from is when a newspaper starts losing its reader base, they tend to hire big names to become their columnists, just as a football teams do when they are at the bottom of the league. This phenomenon results in cutting costs in other areas and by reducing the numbers of special reports and reporters on the field where the newspaper feeds more and more from news agencies instead of writing unique stories. Thus, they face an endless loop – a fate more than one newspaper has met in Turkey.What media companies need to realize is that they shouldn't be competing against one another, but rather competing to attract the attention and gain the trust of readers. It is only through realizing this that we can take actions that are necessary not merely to save the day, but grow. Allow me to conclude this week's article with another quote from Picard: "Thus, direct competition among media [companies], such as newspaper versus newspaper or magazine versus magazine, is really not very high. However, overall media competition for audiences' time and advertisers' expenditures is high."