And in that instant that boy with his face on the sand became a girl with long flowing black hair, wearing a pink Disney princess dress, lifeless against the surf. He is my child. He should be everyone’s child.
Everything else is so trivial.
Category Archives: media
AGE-ISM
Society is cruel on women of certain age. If you get past the age of 30, you’re already dismissed as old. But honestly at 35 I still feel like I am 25 but wiser than my 25-year-old self. I would rather be my 35-year-old self than be scatter-brained, clueless 25-year-old me.
Hollywood is one of the biggest proponent of age-ism:
Aging Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal ‘Too Old’ to Play 55-Year-Old’s Lover
37-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal was recently told by a Hollywood producer that she was “too old” to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. In an interview with The Wrap, Gyllenhaal said she was surprised by the producer’s admission, but that it’s just one of the many “disappointing things about being an actress in Hollywood.”
“It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”
When will society stop feeding our insecurities?
I oftentimes feel ugly due to weight issues but maybe in reality I’m not really that bad-looking. Then the pressure to be the perfect size 10 after giving birth has never been that greater than before. Social media has made it worse, with photos of your elementary school classmates frolicking in the beach in their two-piece swimsuits dominating your Facebook newsfeeds.
DOWNRIGHT VICIOUS
Spinbusters used to be amusing. Vicious but entertaining. Entries give you something akin to schadenfreude, especially to media insiders. It had the ability to cut down holier-than-thou news teams or people to size.
However, they have begun to go downhill when (it seems like) blog management changed (thus the change of blog url). They have become too mean. Really mean. No longer funny.
And this validates my observations
How to be a real journalist, according to experts at Spinbusters
The Spinbusters, a website run by professional journalists who have received awards in spelling and grammar, recently posted a blog entry entitled Human of the Year: The Newbie Journo. [See: Spinbusters]
The blog entry criticized younger media practitioners by saying that they were not the experts they proclaimed themselves to be, a status conferred only on “working journalists,” referring obviously to their delusional selves and their other multiple personalities.
Without intending to, the blog entry came up with several rules regarding the practice of journalism in the Philippines, which, unfortunately, didn’t cover the use of rock, a useful tool in journalism.
Here are five tips on becoming the next big thing in Philippine journalism, according to the Spinbusters.
See the rest of Boojie Basilio’s blog entry here
TRAGEDY STRIKES BEFORE THE YEAR ENDS
Photo from InterAksyon.com by Brandy Roa Solayao
As of today, the last day of 2014, rescuers and retrieval personnel of the Catbalogan City government are still searching for the missing victims of the landslide in Burak, Brgy. Mercedes, Catbalaogan, Samar. Fifteen people are reported dead, three of whom were small children–the youngest was 3 years old. It has been raining non-stop for two days as Typhoon ‘Seniang’ swept from Northeast Mindanao to Eastern Visayas. The typhoon dumped huge amounts of rainfall, causing massive flooding in its wake. Misamis Oriental has declared a state of calamity. In Leyte near the town of Carigara, a bridge gave way to the rushing river that has overflowed, cutting off several towns from Tacloban City.
In short, I am not in a celebratory mood.
The kids and I had been here in Catbalogan since December 23 to celebrate the holidays. So far none of our plans pushed through due to bad weather. To make matters worse, my kids and I were down with a nasty bug, triggering really bad asthma attacks. Trips to the beach and other jaunts would have to wait until our next visit.
This year has been tumultuous for me personally, bringing me highs and really deep lows. I changed jobs but before that, I succumbed to the burnout that has affected many of my colleagues in the online news business. One such colleague-friend left her editing post almost at the same time as I did. She told me the high stress level she had been enduring for the past three years has induced neurological ailments in her. “It’s not worth it in the end,” she told me, “at the expense of my health.” She quit her online news job and now she’s a correspondent for an overseas publication and she says she still has her internal targets but she’s doing her job in her own pace.
I can say the same thing for me. I do my job at my own pace and I choose the coverage I have to go to, depending on what my priorities for the month are. I set my internal targets and I am now developing my own system since I am working alone.
Do I miss the fast-paced newsroom/news cycle? So far not yet. Do I miss reporting things that matter? Sometimes but when I see my colleagues rushing past me due to hectic deadlines, I am thankful that I don’t have to deal with that anymore. Although my news cycle is slower, I have different demands and different challenges that I have to deal with. One of them is to be verrrrrry ahead of everyone else. That’s really tough but somehow manageable.
Still winging it, being a working mom. This year we sent the twins to school so at least somehow their boredom at home lessened a little bit. Sometimes I marvel at how quick their minds work. They’re an active lot.
Thankful for the opportunities and experiences learned this past year. Here’s to 2015!
On covering dead children
“Being calmly rational about dead children feels like a very particular form of madness. Whatever else journalistic objectivity is, it surely cannot be the elimination of human emotion. If we don’t recognise that, we are not describing the full picture.” How can journalists be objective when writing about dead children? by Giles Fraser (The Guardian)
Palestinians gather around the body of 40-day-old baby Kerem Ebu Zeyid, who died after Israeli attacks in Gaza on 29 July. Photograph: Belal Khaled/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
That’s why I can’t cover war. Or famine. It’s gut-wrenching trying to be objective when kids are involved. Going to Yolanda-hit areas already shattered me. I am a very passionate and emotional person pa naman. Kaya it’s better for me to be a heartless business reporter. (hehe)
No, really. I can’t cover these topics because it destroys me. People like me are oftentimes taken over by emotions. The reason why I lasted as a business reporter is because it is one of the coldest subject a non-initiated journalist can think of covering. The reason I cannot cover war, disasters, famine, and depressing things like that is because I hate them. I hate covering things I abhor because I cannot distance myself from the reasons that why these stuff happen. I will always take sides and it will reflect through my writing. I cannot possibly write about dead children without any emotion lest I be accused of being a sappy unprofessional journalist.
Some people thrive in reporting horrors like that and I do salute people who do because without them, who would deliver to us the news from the ground?
But then, I will be the last person raising my hand for the assignment. Not because I am afraid of the uncomfortable circumstances but because it will rip my heart and head apart.
Which reminds me, I haven’t been debriefed from my Yolanda coverage.
THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW WHEN DATING A JOURNALIST
I found this entry from an old blog of mine when I was looking for inspiration to pick up blogging again. I still find it relevant to my life, especially that I am an online journalist who lives in a much faster news cycle.
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THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW WHEN DATING A JOURNALIST
i’m taking a cue from 5 things you should know when dating a journalist. (which is a little too arrogant for my taste. no wonder the author is still single).
here is my version, philippine context.
1. we’re perpetually poor. we cannot take you to fancy restaurants—unless we have gift checks. since we’re poor, expect us to to go dutch.
2. we drop everything when our desks a.k.a editors call to do some breaking stories.
3. we are forever tethered to our laptops and cellphones because of item number 2 above. no, it’s not because we’re having an affair or we have another boyfriend in another city or building. it’s just when the mother ship calls, we have to answer. live with it.
one classic example was our colleague who lost everything to tropical storm ‘ondoy’ last year. the only ones she was able to save were her children, the shirts on their backs, her cellphone and laptop.
4. we are not part of the philippines as we are not covered by regular, special or any other holidays. sometimes long weekends as a result of public holidays being moved to monday or friday mean more work for us.
5. we have irregular working hours. sometimes we can work at home but sometimes we can log in 14-hour day workdays. deal with it.
6. we wake up at 9 am (if we really want to be sprite and early) because of item number 5 above. so don’t call us in the morning. we’re not half-human before 9 am.
7. we just love our coffee. some of us run on caffeine because long press conferences and senate hearings make us sleepy. just look at the roster of senate front-runners: bong, jinggoy, lito lapid…
8. we’re assholes and bitches by nature (the degree varies from one journalist and news organization to another) because we have to be. i haven’t met any shrinking violet journalist or if ever there was one, she/he would have been out of the business within a year. we deal with some of the country’s most powerful, famous/infamous, richest and brightest/dumbest. we have to be tougher so that we can talk to them at eye level. if you can’t take that, then i’m sorry we are not for each other. move on.
9. we may sound like we are name-dropping on purpose when we talk about our day-to-day affairs with you. some of us do but most of the time we barely notice that we already sound like arrogant fools. but no, that’s life for us.
10. we lead interesting lives. that’s one aspect that attracted you to us. we are interesting. we must be knowledgeable about so many things so that we can write about anything—even if we really don’t know anything at all. we like to bluff our way out of any article or situation.
11. and we lead dangerous lives. and most of the time we live for it. as one older colleague said, “yey may libel [case] na ako! i’m made!” talk about being twisted.
12. we’re grammar nazis/snobs. even if some of us are grammatically flawed.
13. we always carry big bags. especially women journalists. we have to have our: digital recorders, digital cameras, notebooks, tons of pens, laptops, 2 cellphones and/or wireless landline, chargers for all of our gadgets—on top of our regular stuff like kikay kits and whatnot.
14. we like gossip. we like to gossip. that’s how we get our leads.
15. we work hard, we party hard. we like our beer. and karaoke. if you can’t dig it, then we are not meant for each other.
16. we are jaded. the greatest cynics of this country.
17. we like interviewing our dates. that’s how we get our information. if we cannot pry it out of you, then we talk to different people who orbit you or those people who may even just be remotely related or known to you. that’s how we operate. if you can’t take the hot seat, then get out. but that’s a shame—that means we really like you.
18. we always have deadlines. sometimes deadlines come first before you do. because deadlines can really kill us. our editors are nasty beasts, especially when they haven’t had their coffees. we’re talking, walking time bombs.
19. we easily get bored. if you’re an uninteresting person, then good luck, we won’t be seeing you ever again!
20. we’re hard to pin down. we cannot exactly tell you where we would be at 2 pm because we might be a) doing an ambush interview and God knows where that would be; b) we may be chasing a story and God knows where that would lead us; c) unless there is a press conference scheduled at that time, we cannot tell you exactly what we would be doing then.