I left at 6:30 am arrived at 8:30 to my seminar this morning and I was still early by an hour. At least this was not a repeat of my 3-hr drama last week.

Note to self: avoid Monday morning coverages.

I got the stories I wanted and have arranged coffee dates in Manila, HK, and SG soon. 😁

I was with a colleague, B, who had to cover the same event. He was my junior and I was his editor in the paper where we both came from and I also recruited him to join our team when I jumped platforms. He often asked me if I could be one of his reference persons and I wrote letters of endorsements for him when he was applying for scholarships or trainings abroad. Long story short, we had a long history together so it was just natural for us to talk about so many things while we were working today.

We were chatting about his lifestyle right now, how he enjoys being a freelancer, with several jobs that do not tie him down. His philosophy now is, “I don’t wanna work past 3 pm. When I’m done, I’m done so I can do other things or rest.”

His last steady job burnt him out—he was writing 10 stories a day. I said why the heck did you even do that?! He said it was the nature of his beat/s and as long as there were stories, he can’t stop because—as GMA’s  24 Oras newscast says— di natutulog ang mga balita (because news doesn’t sleep). We were the last generation of reporters who didn’t balk at “borrowing” documents critical for reportage or learning how to read upside down because we couldn’t touch the document that was on the table of the source we were talking to. I still literally bodyslam the elevator doors so I can quickly do an “ambush” interview. Just today, I followed my source to his car because we were talking about something critical. This colleague and I are trained to stalk people and wait for hours for the opportunity to do a 5-min interview.

Why am I relating this? Because B told me the new generation of reporters he is encountering in the field and the ones he is training right now do not know how to do interviews, what to do during presscons, how to be enterprising, how to research for information or events to catch sources, or even research how a source looks like so they would know who to watch out for in large events. Or even a chance encounter.

“These are pandemic journos. They learned journalism in school when schooling was done purely online,” he said.

Some of the slightly “older” journos started their careers during the pandemic, when news was delivered to them via press releases or presscons were conducted online. For three years, that’s all the kind of journalism they knew. That’s why the new grads and the slightly older ones didn’t know how to cover—even register for an event!

“OMG! No wonder Tita M and I were the only ones asking questions during the XXX forum last week!” I exclaimed to B.

He said yes, we were the last journos who ask questions during briefings. When B left his regular job, one staff in a government agency that he used to cover said, “You know B, no one is asking questions during xxx briefing since you left.” 🤦🏻‍♀️

B told me this is the reason why news stories these days in every print/online platforms are copycats of one another.

Another young reporter asked where he got the story about xxx. He said, “I just got the data from this agency’s website but I won’t give it to you because it’s already there, it’s public.” These journos do not know how to do their research and to trawl the internet to look for news pegs or leads. 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ I came from a generation where we do our rounds of government offices to sniff out leads. We befriend janitors, security guards, receptionists, etc to learn who came into the office of so and so. We would learn about the agenda, we would know who are fighting what. I taught these things to my students when I was still part-time faculty member about 10 to 11 years ago.

I think this strengthened my resolve to go back to teaching. We cannot have this kind of media landscape, where news no longer provokes us to think, to search for the truth, to ask, and demand accountability. I know the economics of media doesn’t make sense right now but somewhere, somehow there is a way…The New York Times showed us it can be done. Quality news reportage, exclusivity, and value-add command subscription. That’s how our company and our rivals make money.

It’s really sad.