THE fall season always brings something new that will astonish us. Let the leaves fall, leaves leave, fall falls. But perhaps ushering the season comes with the promise of new beginnings. A few old works might fit the bill.
It is said that when God wanted to separate light from darkness, He created day and night. When mortals had a similar itch, they separated editors from reporters.
The world that reporters inhabit is hard to describe and understand. They’re supposed to be smart and exciting, yet they are reviled by people they gore. They are always in the vanguard.
The line between dreaming and writing was nothing more than a translucent thread. What was real and what was imagined became braided together.
If we could only circumvent the time-tested interview format. It is too maneuvered, too adulatory, perhaps too much information, and emphasis in cascades of family background, personal history in rich account of the astonishingly compilation of human dregs and faults.
Today, we’re more aware that all tenets of media are circling the wagon, each vulnerable to falling circulation, down slide advertising, ageing demographics—we’re undaunted.
When I first entered the Philippine Journal Group, as a working press, it was the most intoxicating feeling I had ever experienced. That feeling stayed with me to this day, even if much of the sensory onslaught has change in the electronic age—economic peril. But 40 years ago, to hear the clatter of a floor full of typewriters, the smell of musk from paste pots and hear the reporters yelling for the copy boys as they are summoned to pick up their stories. To wander into that atmosphere for the first time was to know, instantly, what you wanted to do FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
Forget literature. Immortality lay in a front page byline about death row in Muntinlupa Bilibid Prisons. Inside the newsroom, nothing was small time, because if you went out and saw something, and then came back and wrote it up, everyone you knew—all your neighbors, all of your friends—would know about it in the morning. If you hadn’t seen it, no one, would know it happened. Because you were there, everyone would know.
There was no feeling in the world like finishing your last paragraph on a deadline and seeing the white sheet of paper move from the city editor, to the machines and a couple of hours later, while the rest of the city slept, to see that first paper come up with that story on page one, and your name riding atop it. Oh it was a guarantee of eternal adolescence.
There was no real hint that the audience was not always going to be there. True, television was a presence, but then it seemed not to be a threat to the local morning or afternoon papers. All through the decade of the 1960’s, it seemed that was the case, TV was everywhere but it was taking its cues from the papers. It was during the 1970’s that this changed. You didn’t notice it right away. You were too busy fashioning the day’s fact into newspaper stories that consumed so much of your time, that it did not occur to you that, just maybe, people were not reading the front page the way they used to.
They didn’t have to, television had become the front page. And if you were candid with yourself, you had to admit that TV was pretty good at it! The skills you were proud of—this boiling of accidents and local disasters into swallowable stories—were easily transferable on screen, very often the picture takes precedence over the print. And your audience who were waiting at newsstands of the thump at their doors each morning who used to wait at newsstands of the thump at their doors each morning, were now waiting for the anchormen, whose names they know instantly—a byline suddenly seemed ancient.
Some editors and publishers (if you were lucky) anticipating what was going on, concentrated on special sections, and features and columns. In an age of electric efficiency, no one could pretend that nothing has changed in the newspaper business.
