On writing and being read
WHAT do you write? A journalism student asked me this when he dropped by Wednesday afternoon .Why ask me, I asked. He said he saw this corner of this paper and decided to visit. He said it was for a class assignment.
The young man’s question somehow affirmed the sneaky suspicion that crept up my brain way back in college about some columns being read by no one except those whose by-lines are attached to them. And a more recent one – about newspapers not being read, much less studied, even by those who study to become journalists. If he did before coming to interview, he would have deleted the “what” and focused on the “how” and “why”. He did ask those questions and drew answers which were partly cautious so as not to give the impression of ego-boosting, mental dishonesty and false humility.
We write, or talk, because we want to be read, or heard. To be read or listened to without our imposition is definitely the only measure of our work’s effectiveness. That’s why we, provincial journalists, try to rein in our urge to talk about our own work. Except, of course, when triggered by a colleague’s own display of his story or photo on the front page of a national daily he is trying to attach himself to.
The outbursts happen during those nights of loosening up with alcohol, to bring to stable levels the surge of adrenalin common to practitioners of one the most stressful and lowest-paying jobs around.. Alcohol works wonders. It sharpens the tongue and loosens the brain. Or loosens the tongue and sharpens the brain. Or both.
Gin, pressure of work and our week-end arguments exhausted me and my editor, Steve Hamada, to sleep while bedding The Baguio Midland Courier. It was one Saturday night, way back in the ‘80s, when the opinion pages had to be set in linotype, that giant typewriter that embosses on sheets of lead the words, phrases and lines.
Unable to stir us back to life, the letterpress machine operator ran the editorial page without the usual proofreading. He was worried then Benguet Gov. Ben Palispis would find his Sunday morning incomplete, without his copy on his usual breakfast table at Session Café, then the hang-out of politicians and newsmen that is now Jollibee’s.
I woke up too late to wake up Steve. He rushed to the operator, snatched a copy of the editorial page. I saw terror in his eyes when he realized the lines of the editorial he labored on were mangled, garbled, beyond coherence. When the operator told him he was almost through print-