There was a time and a place when news traveled slowly. When it happened on a street then moved to a bus then got stranded in a long queue that got entangled in piles of newsprint and typewriter ribbons. Every word was debated, every angle was rewritten, every spelling was checked. A reporter got scooped by the competition, an editor fumed, a day was ruined. Drafts were thrown in the trash, like many others that suffered the same fate that day. A story was mangled beyond recognition and a byline disappeared. 

There was a time when 8 stories made it to Page One. And nothing else. As Page One proved elusive each day, you hoped to land in the provincial section or the Metro pages. Or live for another day. You fought for every single column-inch of very few pages, for there was a time you got paid per-column-inch.

There was a time when labor unionists staged strikes, crippled factories, and marched for hours, and to write about them meant you had to suffer the sun and the heat, too. You had to keep an eye on a sari-sari store that rented out its phone for a few pesos per 3 minutes. Behind his desk, your wary editor would wait for your call, watching the clock. Standing by the store you dictated your story the way you’d written it in your head. There was no time to sit down to compose the narrative. “Open quote…comma… close quote…period.”

You blurted words out of your mouth as if the phone was your typewriter – to the condemned fate of your editor who probably neither had the typing skills nor the hearing aid to make sense of your incoherent sentences as protesters chanted and police fired tear gas at them.

There was a time you counted the hours until the following day to see if the tyrants at the desk used your story or if the reporter from the competing newspaper beat you – again! – with an exclusive. There was a time you decided to cut short the agony. You rose at 5 am, went to the nearest newsstand and – since you could not afford to buy all the newspapers – quickly read each of them before plotting your coverage in the hopes of seeing your byline under a screaming exclusive story.

Those times are gone. The news cycle, the news process, and the newsroom have been turned upside down. Many journalists like me lived through those times and now manage modern-day newsrooms. 

Is there even anything to learn from the past – given all the changes that have happened in the last decade? 

I can think of 5 major ones that have served as life’s big lessons.

1. It’s not about you

The world is burdened with too many concerns and the least of them is you. You become a journalist because you want people to care – not about you but about the troubles around them. This probably sounds strange in today’s world of selfies, but the newsroom back in the day reminded you of this constantly. You had to sweat for every byline. Your copy and facts had to go through the wringer. And when you did well, you shouldn’t expect to get a pat on the back. That your story and your byline were used was sufficient then. As if that wasn’t enough, you could wake up one morning with some new and minor assignment that was sure to not land you on Page One. You could choose to walk away from it, of course (and I did – many times). But the stories would come and the news would happen and the newsroom would continue to breathe – with or without you. It’s not about you. I always go back to this each time I get obsessed with myself or swim in my delusions of uniqueness.

2. More than just a job

A profession that makes people famous and self-driven is ironically anchored on the value of selflessness. Public interest – the thought of it, the focus on it, the passion for it – is the ultimate deflater of egos that journalism’s power and perks inevitably nurture. In college we compared journalism to priesthood and activism: priesthood because of the meager pay, social life-deprivation, and the long hours associated with it, and activism because Philippine media took pride in its history of fighting a dictatorship and staring down the barrel of a gun. We were told day in, day out: Media is the 4th estate, it’s what helps keep democracy alive. We believed it, we tried hard to practice it. When the going got tough and the demands seemed impossible, it paid to remember that it’s a privilege to be in a job that gives you a ringside view of power, but also allows you to expose its abuses – a job that brings you face to face with suffering but also makes you discover the goodness of man.

3. Courage begins with small steps

You want to be a reporter? Go to a police station; that’s where you will learn. But how? It’s up to you. What stories do I look out for? It’s up to you. In those days training meant only one thing: on the job, out in the field, on your own. Editors only gave broad strokes, putting enormous faith in your survival skills. You swim or sink; you become a reporter or not. You build courage once you make the first move for a story – a search, a phone call, an interview, a visit, and the stomach for daily frustrations. These lead you to take little risks one step at a time: the risk of getting humiliated, the risk of being rejected, the risk of knocking on wrong doors, the risk of following false leads. Courage doesn’t come in an instant – like when a gun is pointed to your head and you don’t flinch. Courage is not only about confronting hard truths; it’s also about owning up to failures. You acquire it through years of making decisions in the field at crunch time, sorting out the mess by yourself, and taking full responsibility for mistakes made resulting from risks taken. 

4. Value time, manage it well

While the media had just been set free after the 1986 People Power Revolution, decades of repression made the industry unprofitable. Thus we started from scratch. In the early years of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, we reporters shared 3 typewriters in our corner of the newsroom. We lined up to get our slot for the typewriter every single day (a day off was unheard of then). In due time we got to know who typed and composed stories the fastest – and the slowest. Naturally we would choose to wait behind the fastest reporter and avoid the one who would sit for 30 long minutes and savor a smoke before composing his lead paragraph! This was a valuable lesson in time management. Newspapers set 4 pm for story submissions, and editors required at least 3 stories a day. So before the 4 pm deadline, we would have to allot at least 30 minutes as waiting time for the typewriter; an hour or so for composing and rewriting our stories; another hour or so for commuting from our coverage to the office (depending on the mode of transportation: bus, jeep, pedicab, tricycle, you name it); and more hours for gathering news. Because we had to walk from one building to another, press conferences came rarely, public officials never took phone calls, and Twitter was not even a thought, we learned to manage our time well. When you waste your time you waste other people’s time.

5. Listen, stay

Does one learn empathy or is one born with it? Journalists certainly acquire it through listening and staying. In those days reporters only had to deal with one deadline every day. There was time to listen to answers that did not have to be used in a story. There was time to linger in a crime scene, in a village, in the home of a mother who just lost a son. There was time to see a public official after a day’s work, banter with him as you fixed your eyes on the piles of documents on his desk, and catch him in his unguarded moments when he talked about his troubles and his dreams. There was a time those anecdotes did not have to appear in your story; they stayed in your head to help you better understand the bureaucracy and the good men who drove it. To listen, to stay, to experience – these are the immense gifts of journalism that, sadly, today’s wired world often deprives us of. 

As a journo in today’s mobile, virtual and constantly evolving newsroom, I often ask myself if the days of pounding the beat, lining up behind typewriters and venturing out without a mobile phone still mean anything. They do. Those days remind me that what is learned and earned the hard way is what stays. It was true then when news traveled on a bus. It is true now that it is served on your Twitter feed, 24 hours a day. – Rappler.com

Old typewriter image via Shutterstock