Journalism as we know it

Cong Corrales .

I OWE a lot of the stock knowledge I have right now to journalism. If my life is a school term, journalism would be its baccalaureate, masters, and doctorate degrees. I witnessed my father practice it in four different mediums: print (Mindanao Post), radio (DxCC RMN’s pioneering AM station), television (Rainbow TV-12), and he was fortunate enough to use the worldwide web.

He was a widely read person but I have always been fascinated by his command of the language and his skill at presenting an elaborate scheme in a way that any person on the street could understand.

I wasn’t really into journalism at first. I was more of a literary person or I was aspiring to be one. I wrote poems, sonnets, and short stories. I wrote for the school paper but was on the literary section and not on the news or op-ed section.

However, when my father suffered his fifth heart attack, he asked me to be his ghost writer while he was still recuperating in the ICU. First, as a writer, I wouldn’t pass on this opportunity to diversify my writing skill. Second, as a child, I felt honored that he would ask his youngest son.

While I wrote his thoughts for him while he was recuperating, the newspaper had an opening for a typesetter or as millennials today referred to as layout artist. Eventually, I was lured into journalism or as I called the people who practiced them as the “news guys.” I asked the editor-in-chief then for a stab at writing news stories. He was gracious enough to give me an opportunity.

When I told my father I was venturing into another form of writing, he told me there was nothing to be jittery about. He said journalism is nothing but storytelling or truth-telling as he put it. He told me it is like writing a short story but using real-life situations and characters.

He cautioned me though against the use of fancy vocabulary since journalism is more on informing readers, and not to impress them. He told me to understand current events keenly so that I could write clearly and concisely. That, after all, is the essence of communication.

“How could you make people understand the issue you’re reporting about if you, the reporter, do not understand what you’re reporting about,” he said.

So, that was to be my guiding principle in my foray into journalism: write to express, not impress, and write to inform, and not romanticize with the form — substance over form, if you will. If the context is king, content is queen, and form is one weak prince, I dare say.

As I have said at the start of this column, journalism to me is like one long school term in that you get to learn a lot of things in the course of your career. I remember JB Deveza and I scoured through the city for a finance guy to explain to us what the hell are CDNs and CDOs when the Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, which led to the collapse of Wall Street.

The collapse had affected our local economy and we have to understand first what happened in order for us to report it clearly. In the course of my journalistic career, I have had a crash course on almost anything under the sun — from different sciences to mathematics.

In my years of working with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, I got to revisit my literary writing past. Well, not entirely. But, when my editor-in-chief knew that I used to dabble in poems and sonnets, she said the skills I had in writing poems are also applicable to journalism. Yeah, I was also as surprised like you. She said for news reports to be compelling, the writer must also learn the art of cadence and meter. They don’t have to rhyme, of course, you silly goose.

That’s it, how my ongoing journalistic career started in a nutshell — old school.

So when the Presidential Communications Operations Office’s dynamic duo, Secretary Martin Andanar and Margaux “Mocha” Uson, and their trolls suggest that journalism, as we know it, is passé and that the “new media” is the “in” thing, I become curious. I thought I should check out what this so-called new journalism is all about.

Journalism, as in life, is a continuous process of learning. Even if the old school in me thinks that there’s no such thing as new or old journalism, the curious cat in me still wanted to check it out. My colleagues told me to dismiss PCOO since only the medium changes but the skill in writing the content of the report is still essentially the same: “6 Ws and 2 Hs.” In case you’re wondering what the extra “W” and “H” are, they’re the “whence” and “hence” of the story.

As this administration’s deodorant communication unfolds, however, all I’ve seen so far have been smokes and mirrors. Their reports are full of factual errors, unsubstantiated claims, and a butt load of typos and the lack of proper punctuations. I’m not even going to dignify Mocha’s “symbolism photojournalism” by discussing it in this column.

I know Martin is currently doing the rounds, selling his brand of “new journalism” but I think I’ll just stick to the “old journalism” (if there is such a thing) or plain and simple journalism. That is, until I see a compelling reason to jump ship. For now, I’m proud to be an adherent of plain and simple journalism.