The Sunday paper
I fondly remember a late Sunday morning in 2016, when I was awakened by a thud beside my bed and my mother grunting, “Ayan na ‘yung dyaryo mo!” I know that the cost of my newspaper-buying habit, which I needed during that time as a 15-year-old just starting in the exciting world of campus journalism, was beginning to weigh on my parents. However, those thoughts selfishly dissipated when I opened my eyes to the thick package that arrived.
It looked different than the papers I used to buy to practice my “kontesero” skills, with a cardinal rule stating that news should always be above the part where you fold the paper. However, what I saw was a cacophony of pictures on the cover—a photo of a kid surfing above the fold, a breathtaking view of the place we all know from TV as “La Presa” below it—while yesterday’s news could only be seen at the very bottom of the page.
I then read it from section to section, trying to digest the paper’s boatload of features. Secretly, I was trying to channel how my father read the tabloid he was buying every day—how he would digest each page intently, like a sacred ritual. As I tried to fake my way through the entertainment pages, my mother called, saying that it was already time for lunch!
No 15-year-old kid would waste two hours reading a Sunday newspaper, I thought to myself, laughing at the absurdity of it all. But at that point, I knew I was hooked. That was the moment I promised myself that, after my studies, I would only work for a newspaper.
It is the dream that propelled me to spend all my spare waking hours on campus journalism, where I truly felt that oft-repeated mantra of choosing a career that you love so that you never spend a day working. In high school, it was the joy of changing and redesigning our paper with ideas I learned from that Sunday paper and winning awards in the aftermath. In college, it was seeing people around campus reading the newspaper you worked on. If I was awkward in many other things, it was in campus journalism that I felt supremely confident that I was doing something right with my life.
However, as I started to trudge down the sentimental days a college student would go through before their graduation, I began to question this dream of mine. I was no stranger to the hard times journalists often face in pursuit of their careers. The issue of whether a journalist could live comfortably on their income was something that I encountered every time. It hits hard, especially when I see an instructor in my college courses taking up teaching as a side job just because their pay does not suffice or leaving the industry altogether for the more stable world of academia.
There is also the issue of being a journalist in a country like the Philippines, where the irony of being called the home of Asia’s freest press becomes sullied as you become inured with reality. Especially in my current roles in the college press, many of my colleagues would be Red-tagged and attacked by state forces, even as they only tried to amplify the stories of the marginalized. As history shows, from Maguindanao to Percy Lapid, even those in the mainstream media are not spared.
The media industry itself is amidst a moment of great transformation. Gone were the days when a paper dropped on someone’s doorstep would thud due to its sheer weight; even the thought of dropping a newspaper on someone’s doorstep seems quaint. In the past few weeks, newspapers and magazines with storied histories have had to lay off people. In our neck of the woods, a news channel known for the quality of its journalists had to shut down because of insurmountable losses. I still buy the paper I read in 2016, but undeniably, the changes in how we consume news and the sad reality of being a critical voice under a thin-skinned leader have slimmed it down.
Even my life has changed in many ways. My father has long passed, and as the eldest child, I sometimes think that I now ought to give back to my family, who have supported me throughout my life as a campus journalist (and bought me all those newspapers throughout the years).
It troubles me that I find myself conflicted about my way forward, at a point in my life where I feel I am so close to the dream I have been yearning for. Surely, society’s need for a critical and free press will survive whatever challenges the media is facing right now, and journalists are willing to find new ways of truth-telling. But isn’t it unsettling that such a bedrock of public service is being shaken to its core, despite its best efforts and intentions?
However, what puts that spring on my step every presswork time is how, despite these challenges, the Sunday paper I read eight years ago continues to press onwards. Probably, for it to thrive, it had to shed off how it saw itself before and adjust to what readers need from it now. I am still scratching my head about how not to, but maybe the 15-year-old who dreamed of having a byline or two on the front page need not leave what he promised he’d do for the rest of his life.
—————–
Ian Raphael Lopez, 22, is the editor in chief of Tanglaw, a student publication in the UPLB College of Development Communication. He is trying to claw out of college before the academic year ends in June.
