Staying alive at 35

The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s annual celebration today is cramped by a pandemic as well as a fraught political atmosphere that weighs heavy on independent journalism. Yet hope springs. The newspaper marks its 35th year striding toward the future with a plan of action to stay afloat and alive. Projections made before the new coronavirus lurched onto Philippine shores and thereafter ravaged the economy and the public health system, such as it was, have been retooled. The shards of derailed plans have been gathered, their sharp edges smoothed into instruments of recovery. As chief operating officer Rudyard Arbolado tells it elsewhere in this issue, up is the way to go.

It’s been an amazing journey, and remains so despite the unprecedented damage inflicted by COVID-19 and the economic downturn. The late, lamented editor in chief Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, fondly remembered as LJM, told a young interviewer in December 2005 that “the Inquirer is going to be there for more than 100 years.” But for a moment there, the pandemic made the idea of the newspaper being safely produced daily, in fulfillment of its role of informing and empowering its readers, a difficult, in fact dicey, proposition. Other broadsheets had to go solely digital earlier than planned. But an efficient work system faithful to official health protocols was quickly put in place along with work-from-home arrangements to ensure production flow. Inquirer reporters nationwide surmounted the frustration of weak communication signals and virtual press briefings; they managed to deliver stories on the state response to the pandemic and on the Good Samaritans who rose to the grim occasion. By their accounts they stumbled on epiphanies and other lessons in the process.

Anniversaries are momentous, particularly in critical times. Thus, the awards ceremony held early this month for employees who notched 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 years was, though virtual and not the fussy ritual where each, dressed to the nines, was called to a stage and speeches were delivered on-site instead of through Zoom, was still special. That it seemed a more sentimental occasion than usual was a factor derived from a slimmed work force—a result of a voluntary retirement program recently instituted to trim the fat and to keep the company and its employees above water until the economic situation and diminishing ad revenues stabilize.

But the work of newspapering continues, with additional efforts directed at boosting the Inquirer presence through the online edition as well as InqPlus, Inquirer Mobile, Bandera, Cebu Daily News, Radyo Inquirer, and various other irons in the fire. Those both professionally and emotionally invested in this project marvel again at how far it has come from that tiny office in the badlands of Intramuros, Manila, where — we never tire of narrating — on a night beset by a power outage the first issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated Dec. 9, 1985, was produced.

From being a sharp thorn in the side of the Marcos dictatorship that was then on its last legs — its excesses and the resistance finally doing it in—the Inquirer has persevered in speaking truth to power, in leading the national conversation, and in serving as catalyst for meaningful change. The newspaper’s “powerful content” is its strength, then Inquirer board chair Marixi R. Prieto said in December 2010. Her remark calls to mind the ad boycott called by the Estrada administration, which was angered by the Inquirer’s unrelenting coverage of the “Midnight Cabinet,” the extravagant kitchen in the Palace, the luxury homes and presidential bodyguards for mistresses, the malfeasance that nearly brought down stock trading… It likewise calls to mind the newspaper’s exposé on the mass plunder of the pork barrel, which led to three sitting senators being arrested and charged with the crime—a historic development though now caught, like a still life, in the vise of time.

At 35, the Inquirer is firmly on its feet and resisting extinction. Writing in 1986 about the perpetual tension between the state’s projection and the writer’s imagination, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer said: “The State wants from the Writer reinforcement of the type of consciousness it imposes on its citizens, not the discovery of the actual conditions of life beneath it, which may give the lie to it.” She added: “Where the State’s projection of social order allows it to do so, it often goes so far as to imprison the imagination, in the person of the Writer, or the banning of a book.”

And yet: “The Inquirer is going to survive all of us,” LJM told that young interviewer. “It’s going to be there for the Philippines, for the world. It’s going to be there like a pillar of strength.” Indeed, strength—of mind, of purpose—is the fundamental element of staying alive in a precarious time, holding a mirror to the way things are and fighting for what they should be.