Journalism as we know it

I OWE a lot of the stock knowledge I have right now to journalism. If my life is a school term, journalism would be its baccalaureate, masters, and doctorate degrees. I witnessed my father practice it in four different mediums: print (Mindanao Post), radio (DxCC RMN’s pioneering AM station), television (Rainbow TV-12), and he was fortunate enough to use the worldwide web.

He was a widely read person but I have always been fascinated by his command of the language and his skill at presenting an elaborate scheme in a way that any person on the street could understand.

I wasn’t really into journalism at first. I was more of a literary person or I was aspiring to be one. I wrote poems, sonnets, and short stories. I wrote for the school paper but was on the literary section and not on the news or op-ed section.

However, when my father suffered his fifth heart attack, he asked me to be his ghost writer while he was still recuperating in the ICU. First, as a writer, I wouldn’t pass on this opportunity to diversify my writing skill. Second, as a child, I felt honored that he would ask his youngest son.

While I wrote his thoughts for him while he was recuperating, the newspaper had an opening for a typesetter or as millennials today referred to as layout artist. Eventually, I was lured into journalism or as I called the people who practiced them as the “news guys.” I asked the editor-in-chief then for a stab at writing news stories. He was gracious enough to give me an opportunity.

When I told my father I was venturing into another form of writing, he told me there was nothing to be jittery about. He said journalism is nothing but storytelling or truth-telling as he put it. He told me it is like writing a short story but using real-life situations and characters.

He cautioned me though against the use of fancy vocabulary since journalism is more on informing readers, and not to impress them. He told me to understand current events keenly so that I could write clearly and concisely. That, after all, is the essence of communication.

“How could you make people understand the issue you’re reporting about if you, the reporter, do not understand what you’re reporting about,” he said.

So, that was to be my guiding principle in my foray into journalism: write to express, not impress, and write to inform, and not romanticize with the form — substance over form, if you will. If the context is king, content is queen, and form is one weak prince, I dare say.

As I have said at the start of this column, journalism to me is like one long school term in that you get to learn a lot of things in the course of your career. I remember JB Deveza and I scoured through the city for a finance guy to explain to us what the hell are CDNs and CDOs when the Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, which led to the collapse of Wall Street.

The collapse had affected our local economy and we have to understand first what happened in order for us to report it clearly. In the course of my journalistic career, I have had a crash course on almost anything under the sun — from different sciences to mathematics.

In my years of working with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, I got to revisit my literary writing past. Well, not entirely. But, when my editor-in-chief knew that I used to dabble in poems and sonnets, she said the skills I had in writing poems are also applicable to journalism. Yeah, I was also as surprised like you. She said for news reports to be compelling, the writer must also learn the art of cadence and meter. They don’t have to rhyme, of course, you silly goose.

That’s it, how my ongoing journalistic career started in a nutshell — old school.

So when the Presidential Communications Operations Office’s dynamic duo, Secretary Martin Andanar and Margaux “Mocha” Uson, and their trolls suggest that journalism, as we know it, is passé and that the “new media” is the “in” thing, I become curious. I thought I should check out what this so-called new journalism is all about.

Journalism, as in life, is a continuous process of learning. Even if the old school in me thinks that there’s no such thing as new or old journalism, the curious cat in me still wanted to check it out. My colleagues told me to dismiss PCOO since only the medium changes but the skill in writing the content of the report is still essentially the same: “6 Ws and 2 Hs.” In case you’re wondering what the extra “W” and “H” are, they’re the “whence” and “hence” of the story.

As this administration’s deodorant communication unfolds, however, all I’ve seen so far have been smokes and mirrors. Their reports are full of factual errors, unsubstantiated claims, and a butt load of typos and the lack of proper punctuations. I’m not even going to dignify Mocha’s “symbolism photojournalism” by discussing it in this column.

I know Martin is currently doing the rounds, selling his brand of “new journalism” but I think I’ll just stick to the “old journalism” (if there is such a thing) or plain and simple journalism. That is until I see a compelling reason to jump ship. For now, I’m proud to be an adherent of plain and simple journalism.

Till the bitter end

NEWSPAPERS were an integral part of our mornings when I was growing up in Gusa. Mornings with my late father consisted of coffee, cigarettes, and newspapers. Yes, you read it correctly. Plural, as in, newspapers.

My father, Emilio, used to say that no one newspaper could cover the different nuances of each news beats. That’s why he always bought several newspapers. Each morning, he’d buy copies of Malaya, Manila Bulletin, Philippine Daily Inquirer (although, I think it was called differently then), and that other newspaper with Gat Lapu-lapu in the middle of its masthead.

Emilio told me each newspaper was good at telling a particular news. Like, one newspaper would be smashing with reporting on the current economics of the country while another would be woefully inept on it but great at reporting political dynamics. So, at the tender age of 11, Emilio had taught me how to spot a newspaper’s niche in the reporting world.

The reason why I have been babbling about newspapers is that a week ago, I heard a scary news. A subsidiary of a major newspaper has supposedly closed down. I said supposedly because it turned out that the regional newspaper is still up and running but its printing presses for Visayas and Mindanao have shut down. Still, a devastating news, depressing at that since I have been in the newsprint medium for the better part of my life.

However, truth be told, the newsprint medium isn’t the first and only news medium I’ve dabbled in. I used to work besides Emilio when he was the news director of GMA-TV 12, back when the franchise belonged to the Saragas. I was an eager high school student writing news articles for the news anchors to read. Only Emilio knew I was writing some news items. It was part of a writing exercise my father made me do. That’s why the news anchors Joyce Ann and even my own brother Enrique Luis didn’t know that some of the news they were reading were mine.

Not too long ago, I worked as the multimedia producers for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. I was in charge of the content of our institutional blog, made data visualizations, information graphics, and of course, investigative reports. Our products were mostly published online except for sometimes when major newspapers and TV networks would feature them in their respective platforms.

How could this be happening? The print medium is the oldest medium. It is at least hundreds of years old. It predates radio, TV, and now, the internet. I have read and heard of the “eventual death” of the print medium. I have been denying myself this fact because it’s too painful for me to even consider.

Last year, Tony Rogers wrote about the grim prospects of the newspaper industry. “For anyone interested in the news business, it’s hard to avoid the sense that newspapers are at death’s door. Every day brings more news of layoffs, bankruptcies, and closings in the print journalism industry.”

Here, Alfonso Pedroche, Philippine Press Institute chairman, writes: “The supply of newsprint runs short as the number of trees, from where a paper is derived dwindles fast. As a result, the cost of newsprint rises to an exorbitant proportion even as the prices of other wherewithals in newspaper or magazine production (such as ink) are turning almost prohibitive.”

Anybody who is in the newspaper business knows this to be true. That’s why most newspapers have their digital copies online nowadays. A friend told me last week that the written word is still king. It’s only the medium in which it is packaged is changing.

Call me sentimental but, for me, nothing beats the smell of ink on a freshly printed newspaper hot off the press. I love the sound the newspaper makes when you spread them with both hands to see better see the center spread. I love the choice of fonts each newspaper chooses. Don’t even get me started on the layouts. That’s where I started my newspaper career. I was a layout artist of one of the local daily newspapers in the city. That was when I met my mentors. That was when I met my current editor-in-chief. He used to be that newspaper’s city section editor.

So, the news that the newspaper industry is dying or stands to be taken over by online platforms is devastating to me.

But I take solace in Pedroche’s last sentence in his article titled “Is print media dying?”: “Though there are great hurdles along the way resulting from the vicissitudes of the modern times, print media shall continue struggling to survive.”

There is no doubt it is on its way out. That part I have now come to terms with. Call me a hopeless romantic but I’ve always had an affinity with the print medium. I know it is in trouble and it is dying out as a news platform. But I’m riding it out until its bitter end.