Competition is good for everyone and we can only think that a mid-week Bermuda Sun will keep this newspaper's fine editorial staff on its toes. The Royal Gazette enjoys a challenge.

Right now there is some healthy competition between The Royal Gazette and its sister paper the Mid-Ocean News yet inevitably some people misunderstand the independence of the papers which are owned by the same company. Given the fact of two independent Editors and separate editorial staffing, there is a good deal of jealous guarding of each paper's sources and each paper's stories.

There are even some people who do not know which of the three papers belong to which company and we were amused recently when a customer asked where in The Royal Gazette Ltd. building he could find the Bermuda Sun.

Then too, most of the editorial staff at the Sun were trained at The Royal Gazette and the Mid-Ocean News and the staff and their friends at Par-la-Ville Road wish them well. It also seems to us that it is healthy to have another voice in the community, especially now that the radio and television news is little more than a daily rebroadcast of this newspaper. We continue to think of that as unfair to the public because it means that most of the daily news they get continues to come from one newsroom. Many people remember the great days of independent broadcast journalism in Bermuda.

For a long time now there have been constant reports in the community that the Bermuda Sun and VSB are planning to amalgamate their newsrooms but if that happened it is not clear to anyone as yet just how it would work. It would be difficult for the journalists to service two masters, one appearing twice a week and one gobbling up news on a daily basis. VSB has done a great deal recently to improve its evening news presentation which is now very slick and uses people who read the news well. But they are clearly short of journalists and prone to mistakes and the changes seem to have produced little result in terms of viewers. Clearly the situation at VSB is not very healthy since recent surveys show that about half the possible TV audience watches news between seven and eight in the evening, be it ZBM, VSB, the US networks, BBC, CNN or whatever, and of that half only an insignificant six percent are watching VSB. The ZBM figure is a good deal better at about a third of the one half of the TV audience which is watching evening news. A suggested explanation for the difference is that many people simply leave their TV on ZBM when The Young and the Restless goes off the air. ZBM does well with its Power 95 radio but most of the radio on both stations has very poor listening figures.

We say all this to point out that while Bermuda has a great deal of media, especially for a very small place, a good deal of the media is troubled and it may be that the public will be seeing changes. The media should evolve and change as the Country changes and here at The Royal Gazette we are introducing changes gradually, but constantly.