The following column does not contain any reference to President Noynoy Aquino or any of his thieving, incompetent officials. But it does touch on journalism and new and old media platforms, topics close to my heart, so I ask for the reader’s indulgence.
On Monday, I start yet another chapter in a career in journalism that began in 1986 when I was taken in as a proofreader in the now-defunct BusinessDay. Together with a couple of good friends in the trade, I am taking over a long-running daily radio program.
Readers of this column will recall that I reassumed the editorship of this newspaper at the beginning of last month after being away from the newsroom for seven years. It was both a new experience and an extremely immersive episode of deja vu for me, as I got involved once again in the all-consuming job of running the newspaper that has given me so many chances to improve my craft over the years.
In the brave new world of “new media,” I returned to the trenches of daily journalism, at a time when the relevance of a professional class of curators of the news was being questioned. I accepted the challenge because I am convinced that journalism remains important, not just as “content” to drive “traffic”; I believe that good journalism, especially the sort which doesn’t sound like it comes straight from the propagandists of the powers that be, will always find appreciative readers, whatever the “platform.”
I know that the way news and opinion is read has undergone dramatic change over the past decade or so, especially with the advent of social media. Much like the radical upheaval caused by the iTunes online music store in the music industry, social media has exploded the old belief that you had to purchase an entire newspaper to get the news and views that you wanted to read.
These days, complicated and ever-changing algorithms developed by the people behind Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like do most of the curating that editors used to do, based on the perceived personal preferences of the online consumer. You get the news that is supposed to be important to you in your news feeds, piece by piece, just like you download only the songs you like on iTunes, without having to buy an entire album by a particular band or solo performer.
But just like iTunes forced the music industry to shape up and attempt to produce only songs that were individually intended to be good and become hits, without the bad stuff that was thrown in just to fill an entire album, journalists are now being compelled by readers to veer away from fluff and filler, which was not read even before the invention of the Internet, anyway.
I am convinced, from my experience writing this column and by my own immersion in social media, that there are more readers out there than ever before. You just have to be on your A-game all the time to grab their attention and get them to read on a regular basis.
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That my own effort to adapt my traditional print journalist’s skills to the new media paradigms has gotten me back the editorship of this paper speaks volumes about the commitment of its owners to embrace new technology and, hopefully, lead it to profitability. That it has also gotten me a talk radio program, a format that has long been derided as archaic and irrelevant by the cultural and media elite is, I think, also a reflection of how wrong-headed and out-of-touch these elites can be.
AM talk radio, like “masa” politics, has long gotten a bad rap simply because it is aimed at a low-income demographic which just happens to include majority of the population of this mostly-poor country. But having worked in two different popular radio stations in the past, I feel that the application of new media paradigms to what is at heart a mass-based traditional medium is all wrong, aside from being a great disservice to the excellent journalists who work in that platform.
Radio still commands a great and enviable mass base, and even from a purely economic standpoint, most radio stations are by and large more profitable than most newspapers. In many areas all over the country where other media – new media, especially – find it difficult or unprofitable to operate, radio is still the default means of mass communication.
Long before the Internet and interactive media, in fact, radio had a lock on immediacy and direct interaction with the audience. Online news platforms may have stolen away most of the high-end audience of radio, but it still has a firm grip on its mass base, which is often entirely different and distinct from that of its visual sibling and rival, television.
But of course, all of these musings on media are of real importance only to its practitioners, many of whom still feel unduly threatened by the supposed primacy of the new platforms. For myself, I can only invite readers of this column to check out my latest foray into an old-media outlet; hopefully, I can be as effective there as I think I am in this column, which is already being read a lot more online than it is in an actual ink-and-newsprint paper.
Which is really a roundabout way of saying: stay tuned. I hope you like radio, because that is my old-new job for the new year, as well.