Newspapers love to cover their competitors’ bad news, but there’s a fine line between being fair, albeit enjoying it, and just being mean. A local case in point: this week, our competition published an article about a lawsuit between my paper and its former editor. (Nothing like having your competitor airing out your laundry.) This, after using a readership survey meant to show that people read community papers to claim, on the front page last month, that they “beat” us — a misuse of the data, and not exactly true. They’ve been running a table showing it in every issue since. They even argued that municipalities were wasting taxpayers’ money if they advertised with us! It’s one thing to compete, quite another to wish for your competition’s humiliation and destruction. Not nice.