Writing a Column a Quarter of a Century On

Volume 1, Issue No. 1

OPINION/COMMENTARY

/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /

. . . . . A community service of The Filipino Web Channel (TheFilipinoWebChannel@gmail. com) and Currents & Breaking News (CurrentsBreakingNews@gmail.com) for the information and understanding of Filipinos and the diverse communities in North America . . . . . .

Our latest as of Friday, July 19, 2019 

~  The Filipino community and the people who inhabit it never fail to get my juices flowing. Not in a sexist way as might be interpreted by some onion-skinned moralist, but in inspiring creativity and thought. Twenty-six years-long and Prerogative hasn't missed a beat in chronicling the passage of time and events mainly in Canada, the United States and the Philippines. Prerogative is my newspaper column born in California out of a need to take a stand and verbalize personal insights and understanding of local issues.

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PREROGATIVE MARKS 26th YEAR

Writing Newspaper Commentaries a Quarter of a Century On

By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ 

Editor, The Filipino Web Channel

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”  ― Virginia Woolf

TORONTO - "He who is fearless as he is merciless and spares no one in search of truth and for the sake of it. He whose words are often too deep and strong that people feel only their superficial pain yet fail to comprehend the soothing wisdom that lies within . . . (He) is relentless and indefatigable in his search for truth . . . "

Those words came out of the mighty pen of a former Literature and English professor at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Ms. Yoly Tubalinal, who co-edits and co-publishes the English-language The Fil-Am Weekly MegaScence, a Filipino newspaper in Chicago, with her husband, Bart Tubalinal, a CPA in Illinois.

She wrote that in her column "The Write Connection" to introduce me as I was visiting the Windy City for the first time in July 2007. Though nobody knew me there personally except for some relatives and friends like media colleague Joseph Lariosa, I had a sizable following among Midwest readers who kept track of my column "Password" which ran for years in her paper in the mid-2000s.

In California (San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) and Arizona (Phoenix), the column was called "Prerogative". Writing commentaries under that banner was the closest to being a syndicated columnist.

I resumed Prerogative in Toronto in 2010, the year of my arrival. Then in January 2012, it debuted in Balita newspaper. (https://www.balita.ca/category/editorial/the-challenge-of-community-journalism/). I still do it, in fact, with none of the slightest intentions to discontinue it wherever my medium takes me. In my early years here, some publications had a field day publishing the column without my permission. 

Prerogative is strictly an opinion piece, and I mean my considered opinion, on current issues relevant to the Filipino community. Every now and then, the header would appear. Many times, it would be removed to fit the allotted space in newspapers.

Password and Prerogative had attracted both praise and condemnation. But it's in the latter that censure by a selected few has been vehement, mainly because people, friends and foes alike, know me, and see me in person as Toronto has become my base.

I remember this small-time thief, an occasional contributor to a left-leaning rag, who had pleaded with the ethnic media association to wield its influence in sanctioning me for my writing style which he claimed was offending people in the community. Which leads me to ask: what's more offensive, larceny or critical writing?

Not surprisingly, the official repudiated him, explaining that "we do believe in the freedom of expression". Prior to that, the thief had called on the toothless socials-oriented press club to discipline me because my language was allegedly exposing people to ridicule.

Well, in the Filipino community long used to praise and perfunctory coverage of events, reporting the raw truth and analyzing its impact are practically unheard of. Anything that deviates from the usual accolade in their regular reading fare is harsh.

Whether Password or Prerogative or Currents & Breaking News, I never stayed away from the genre I've adhered to from the time (that's shortly before the People Power revolution of 1986) I joined the foreign press corps, i.e., pursue investigative journalism. I did so, am still doing it, at the community level. 

This year, Prerogative is 26 years old; its provenance is San Diego. Chicago-bornPassword is on and off but I hope to revive it when writing for Ontario newspapers. Then there's the 13-year-old Currents & Breaking News, my mainstream outreach.

More than a decade later, Ms. Yoly's words still ring true and her characterization suits to a T. Yes, I could be "relentless and indefatigable". I am actually. It is not just my professional lifestyle, it's how I was reared reporting for a world audience.

No amount of physical threats, intimidation, lawsuits, and harassment could stop me from doing journalism the way it is done mainstream. How I report it is how I see it, how I interpret it, with or without a newspaper to speak of. Print, anyway, is just one medium with a very limited reach. The constraints of geography render it an ineffectual tool to reach out to a global audience.

That situation is exacerbated by the explosion of social media - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and the like - which poses an existential threat to newspapers and magazines. To cite an example, the millions of views garnered by my YouTube channels would never be duplicated by the combined number of readers of the three community newspapers I had edited and published in San Diego.

It would have taken more than 20 years for each of the paper to reach one million readers, assuming the 10,000 copies circulated monthly is read by a family of four. To compare, my flagship, The Filipino Web Channel, is just nine years old and it has amassed 2,318,440 views and 3,445 subscribers as of this writing. If I add up my three other channels, total views would reach nearly six million.

Geographic boundaries, language barriers, and social status do not affect the online metrics as they would a physical newspaper. The channel just shows up wherever there's internet access anywhere at any time. 

The core difference also lies in the coverage. A news video speaks for itself on the YouTube channel, and it's immediate because it's alive and in real time. A newspaper is passive. The news becomes stale hours after it happens and broadcast or uploaded on social media.

The news loses one basic element in weekly, fortnightly or monthly publications, and that is immediacy. Journalists write feature articles, news analysis, and commentaries to compensate for the loss of spontaneity. Besides, some stories require deeper interpretation and critical analysis to be understood by laypersons.

Column writing is fun. Aside from sharing insights and personal thoughts, the writer could also inject humor through sarcasm and other literary devices. That, in essence, is my Prerogative.#