Sorry for not sending out a newsletter last Friday. I was in the grip of the existential dread of growing yet another year older.
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There is a thread on Twitter, Editors of Manila still has it pinned, that argues that "the future of journalism can only be saved by woke privileged kids."
There is truth to it. Of the people I started working in news with, most have moved on to other jobs and that has been primarily because of the pay and the work hours.
If you can, after all, earn twice as much for a fraction of the stress, that is math that even the least numerate journalist can do.
But that doesn't account for those who have been in alternative media for decades or for everyone else who is still around and, by all accounts, have managed to at least afford a comfortable life.
If anything, there are more media workers who are just getting by than who grew up with means.
Neither does it account for woke privileged kids working adjacent to journalism and having views on how it ought to be done and not actually doing it.
It can be argued, possibly incorrectly, that they are in the best position to change the industry since they are the best read and don't need to be earning as much to live comfortably while doing it.
They're not doing it, though, and apart from nostalgic laments about how journalism used to be and ought to be will not take our place because they have legitimately better things to do.
Although I accepted Editors of Manila's basic premise that the industry is broken and pushes away those of us who are willing but do not have means, I think there is more to it than money.
Aside from all of us in the newsroom having at least set foot in a college classroom, few of us have their own homes or their own cars. Most of us commute to work from as far away as Cavite or Malabon.
Yes, we do need better pay and better work conditions — GMA Network recently let go of contract workers despite having a good business year and becoming the top network by default — but just as important and probably as a product of that need is the need to change the culture of how we do things. I think online newsrooms are in the best position to do this.
I have been working in online newsrooms since around 2012 and there is a common theme among us who were kids when the internet was still a proper noun: We have not bought in as much to the old system of apprenticeships and "bata bata".
We have always been outsiders, the poor relations of legacy media who have always had to prove to the audience and to those in our parent companies that we can actually do the news.
We have had to be creative with our modest budgets and because online advertising is still figuring itself out have had less to fear from irate advertisers than those in legacy media.
We never bought too much into the culture of playing nice and not rocking the boat because it has never been the same boat.
Ours is the banana boat that half of us are expected to fall off of eventually but at least we'll have had a good time.
I came across this tweet yesterday that explains so much*:
The future of journalism — though not its guaranteed salvation or even survival — is in disaffected kids (and medyo kids) who were not let into the fold of the journalism taught by our betters or were told to play along until they themselves are the betters but have found that there is not much left to win in that particular long game.
Those that have managed to hang on to the banana boat — especially those who have done so out of privilege or really good core strength — have the duty to make it easier for others to not fall off by pushing for better conditions and a system less dependent on how your first editors gauges your potential for success.**
We have, I have always believed, more in common with the people affected by political decisions than the political decision-makers that we cover and that has become more evident as years go by.
We are moving away, in slow baby steps, from newsworthiness because of its source to newsworthiness because of its impact.
Coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte's absolute pardon for the killer Joseph Scott Pemberton, for example, also led to stories that contrasted the pardon with the plight of Filipino detainees who are nowhere close to getting a similar privilege.
Although there were stories on politicians' reactions to and defenses of the president's prerogative, it felt like these were the sidebars to the story of unequal access to justice in the Philippines.
RELATED: Duterte on Pemberton pardon: Allow him the good character presumption
They were, in the end, sound bites that are sooner forgotten while those who were told to go back to detention last year because of questions on whether they were qualified for good conduct releases should not be.
I have often bristled at calls for a return to "old school journalism" — I was lectured once by an editor who was not my editor about using adjectives — because that often means sticking to the facts convenient to the narrative that we are used to.
That, for example, there is corruption in government, and that all we need is this amorphous "political will" to fix it.
That we must be united for our country to move forward — united in what and united how is often left for us to figure out. That we are "resilient" and that that is what makes us great as a people.
More on that from this piece from the Poynter Institute:
The "facts" and "truth" that have generally been deemed objective are actually centered on a mainstream, white, male, able-bodied, cis-gendered perspective — not actually objective or neutral at all.
"The views and inclinations of whiteness are accepted as the objective neutral," wrote Wes Lowery in a recent New York Times opinion piece. "Those selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers." The dangers of this, he wrote, are that "instead of telling hard truths in this polarized environment, America's newsrooms too often deprive their readers of plainly stated facts that could expose reporters to accusations of partiality or imbalance."
We are obviously not a white society, pretend as we might, but is also holds true. As media revived the killing of Jennifer Laude, the transgender woman that Pemberton killed, so too did it revive the old debate on whether to call her Jennifer or Jeffrey — the name on her birth certificate.
Some retained the compromise of using Jeffrey "Jennifer" Laude — a practice used sparingly and usually only for notorious criminals — but more, much more than when the murder was first reported, went with Jennifer Laude, an editorial decision that would never pass in a newsroom that prides itself on doing journalism properly and the way it has been done for decades.
* In very few words
** One of my first editors nearly had a heart attack finding out I never studied the Seven News Values. I have since learned, in discussions with the Peace and Conflict Journalism Network, that these values related more to selling newspapers than actual newsworthiness.
*** In this story for ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ birthday, we talk to claimants who received reparations for rights violations during Martial Law and about moves in Congress to make his birthday a national holiday. Sort of a “both sides” of the story but not quite.
**** Please feel free to reply by email if you disagree with stuff I say (or, indeed, even if you agree) or if there’s something you’d like me to cover in future letters.
If it helps, imagine I live in a deserted beach on a remote island. It certainly helps me.
Photo: Laslovarga / CC BY-SA