Volume 5, Issue No. 28
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
~ Ways to serve the community vary from person to person, from one organization to another. Some do it with an eye for financial rewards, others for recognition, and still others for the public good. Three newspapers, a blog (https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/), and YouTube vlogs (Romar Media Canada) later, the commitment remains the same: expose wrongdoing for the information and guidance of the community.
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FROM SAN DIEGO TO TORONTO
Exposing Wrongdoing as a Public Service
When Fully Informed, the Community Gets Stronger
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
"The best kind of happiness is a habit you're passionate about."
- Shannon L. Alder
TORONTO - Going over files from years of writing in California brings me back to where I began community journalism 26 years ago.
That genre was an unforeseen enterprise. I was just chilling out from a decade and a half working as a foreign correspondent and needed a respite from the exhausting daily reporting of news developments in the Philippines. I thought a hiatus would be reenergizing.
When I left the homeland for the United States, the sitting president was Fidel V. Ramos. He had been just several months into the office left by a termed-out Cory Aquino whose tumultuous presidency I covered from beginning to end.
From the day her husband Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino was assassinated on August 21, 1983 to her accession to power via the People Power revolution that overthrew the strongman Ferdinand Marcos Sr. on February 22-25, 1986, news coverage in Manila had been hectic, especially during the successive coup attempts to depose her.
For years prior to Aquino's assassination I was reporting for the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun. And before that, with The Manila Chronicle which was shut down by martial law in 1972. (Related video: Coming Home to the Chronicle Where It All Began).
The former senator's death sparked an exodus of foreign reporters to Manila. That was about the time I was invited to join the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur and to put up a Manila bureau. (Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik0AXXyPXaE)
Writing for a major wire agency was always frenzied. It helped that Hamburg was seven hours behind Manila, so that gave enough time to cross-check the facts of a story and polish it before sending it by teletype.
Anyway, I had looked forward to a grand vacation that turned out to be another journey in journalism, this time at the local level. From international to community reporting, the contrast was immense.
For one, reporting for a world audience does not afford face-to-face interaction with readers. The writer is just another byline, largely faceless, unrecognized except for the name. On the other hand, community reporting runs smack into everyone else storified in one's reportage. Personal confrontation therefore is unavoidable.
I had started to publish the first of my three newspapers in San Diego in June 1998 coinciding with the centennial celebration of Philippine independence, knowing that June 12, 1898 was when Filipinos yanked out Spain from centuries of colonization.
The symbolism of that date was meaningful to me personally, and for my broadsheet called Diario Veritas, for right there and then, it embarked on the kind of public service no other community publication had ever dared to do - reporting the unsavory truth no matter who got in the way and standing by it regardless of the difficulty.
I lay claim to the fact that Diario Veritas had pioneered investigative journalism in the Filipino community in San Diego where a flourishing Filipino population, very much obsessed with beauty pageants and lavish socials, practically ignored scandals swirling around them.
Three years after I launched it - and along the way winning more adversaries than friends for its clear-cut mission to expose wrongdoing - the mainstream San Diego Weekly Reader took notice. (Full article at: A Filipino writer takes on his San Diego countrymen
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Much to the surprise of a hostile community, the Reader featured me and Diario Veritas as its cover story in its June 14, 2001 edition. Author M. G. Stephens, who has published 18 books, wrote the lengthy article on assignment for the newsmagazine.
Twenty-three years have passed and reading Stephens' article now is like looking at a vintage mirror and seeing the very same things, no longer in San Diego, but in Toronto where the demographics are very similar to California's Navy town.
When I came here in 2010, I was flushed with the idea of having my own publication in the image and style of Diario Veritas. So gung-ho was I that I went to a bank and tried to convince, naively, the manager to lend me money so I could start my business. While my business plan was good, the bank refused as I had no collateral.
I thought then that another newspaper would not be a redundancy because the dozen tabloids at that time were indistinguishable in their look and treatment of news. Their preference has always been regurgitated press releases and entertainment staple. And the default source is the unvetted social media, mainly Facebook, where gossip of any kind is passed off as legitimate news.
I did not see any competition because mine would have been entirely different in everything. It would be worth being called a newspaper in the traditional sense. Doing away with superficial coverage would have easily made it distinctive.
I believe then and now that the Filipino community deserves more than being fed with stories and rumors about the lives and foibles of movie stars and the like. The community needs to know the real from the fake leaders and role players.
Like many business startups, I took the audacious move to put up Diario Veritas by enlisting support from my siblings, friends and believers. Then I converted my parents' one-car garage into an office and furnished it with second hand furniture.
My workhorse, the computer, was brand new top of the line Mac OS complete with all the accessories for publishing. It was a gift from my daughter. I had to read tons of information before I had a full understanding of how to create a newspaper.
Diario Veritas catered mainly to Filipinos in Southern California. As I was intent on reaching out to the broader and diverse communities, I created two other publications - The Philippine Village Voice (thus the still-current email address PhilVoiceNews@aol.com) and The District Times.
None of the three periodicals earned money, which was not at all surprising considering their commitment to unearthing corruption and wrongdoing. No regrets though. It was an effort to serve the community the best way I know! (Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved).
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