Shortly before his return to the Octagon in September after six years of being away, MMA fighter Nick Diaz had this to say: "I have a lot of resentment toward the sport for taking so much from me but not giving anything back."
He lost the fight and that isn't even the only thing that makes the quote resonate. I was talking this weekend with someone leaving local news to write about other people's money.
It's partly over indifferent top management who are felt only when they descend from the heavens to micromanage and over lack of support for news producers.
It is probably the same or similar in other jobs, but not a lot of industries sell themselves as a calling and a public service.
"I fight and everybody benefits and I don't," Diaz also says, and this is sort of true for us as well.
In a small National Union of Journalists of the Philippines survey of 200 journalists and media workers in March, 44% of respondents said they are paid around P15,000 a month or lower. Fifteen percent get P5,000 or less a month.
The Photojournalists' Center of the Philippines, in a separate survey, found that 27% of respondents said get P30,000 per year, or about P2,500 a month. A majority of respondents are paid per photo, with 17% saying they get P300 for each.
These are circumstances we warn aspiring journalists about, but there are other things we tend to gloss over.
Beyond the pay are reports of censorship — or of pieces being published in a newspaper but not on its website — and news considerations that go beyond the newsroom.
These are all, of course, just reports that people will likely have forgotten about a week or so later.
Maybe, in time, the companies involved will address them and their staff will have the chance to process and make peace with these decisions.
It is also possible that they will not and will just wait for these issues to go away. Which they won’t, at least not for news staffs that still believe in this fight.
Some hope, though, from this report of pushback on a top management mandate to prefer the use of “strongman” to refer to ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos instead of the more familiar “dictator”.
We might not have shares in the news companies we work in but we have as much ownership of the news as they do and, it could be argued, have more skin in the game.
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Here is a great read from Hannah Reyes Morales on the New York Times on whale shark tourism in a town in Cebu, on its effects on whale shark feeding and migratory habits, and the effect of dependence on tourism during a pandemic.
It has a heartbreaking twist, but what really hit me was this line that we also heard from tawilis fishers in Taal when conservationists cautioned that it was an endangered species:
Mark Rendon, the president of the sea wardens, is aware of the criticism but is unmoved. “We know the whale sharks better than they do,” he said of the efforts by conservationists to end the practice.
Bea Cupin’s reluctant (?) return to political reporting has her looking into PDP-Laban, the administration party that might yet be sidelined by an internal rift and the prospect of the president’s daughter running for a national position.
One factor could be that the president isn’t all that into working on the party that he used as a vehicle to the presidency.
Meong Cabarde of the political science department of Ateneo de Davao University had this to say:
So now, if you notice, he's not that passionate in resolving the factions, even if he represents PDP-Laban. He is lukewarm about it because he is, one, already stepping out and resigning from politics; second, I don't think he has strong beliefs in a political party.
Also, here is former Rep. Walden Bello, saying “Fuck you, Marcos” on TV.
More importantly, a discussion on why he and labor leader Ka Leody De Guzman are running for the country’s top posts. More on their platform here.Last from last week: The Ombudsman is proposing amendments to the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, some of which, transparency advocates say, are “very vague”. That vagueness could mean even less transparency on government officials’ net worth and interests.
Related to those amendments (though not so much an amendment as a restatement, I guess), is penalizing “commentary” on government officials’ wealth declarations, a provision that would be problematic for freedom of expression and of the press.
On the one hand, he wants media to limit itself to publication of the Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth, but also “reminded media that all versions of the story should be heard and not just one party who may have an ax to grind – or harbor any motive for that matter — against specific government officials.”