No more recapturing the day Ninoy died

The country remembered the death of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino with a holiday last Monday, August 21. On that day in 1983, he was assassinated on his return to the Philippines from exile in the United States. The killing triggered massive protests that culminated in the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos as dictator three years later.

To those who were not yet born, or may have forgotten that side stories that happened in the aftermath of the assassination, let it be recalled that your newspaper The FREEMAN was the only newspaper in the entire country that managed to come out with the news on the day of the assassination itself. It did it with a single-page, three-story extra edition.

That extra edition screamed “AQUINO KILLED” and hit the streets just a few hours after the incident at the airport in Manila that now bears his name. The Freeman was the only newspaper that managed to come out with the story on the same day because Marcos clamped down on the news in Manila. That proved propitious for us because then, Manila newspapers had a story they could not print. We had a newspaper that did not have the story.

So The Freeman got in touch with a few friends in Manila media and they provided us with the story we needed. A team was hastily assembled to do the extra edition, which consisted of the main story, one side bar, and one on local reactions consisting mainly of manon-the-street interviews. The extra edition was a single sheet with nothing in the back - not enough stories to make it on time before darkness fell.

We had an initial run of a few hundred copies, which were all gobbled up in minutes by people in the street and on passenger jeepneys passing by our offices. So a few additional print runs were done, and copies were sent further out into Colon. But that was as far as the copies could go because they got sold out. We eventually had to stop otherwise work on the regular edition for the following day would be compromised.

The FREEMAN had a few more extra editions after that but today the extra edition is dead as well, overtaken by faster technologies. With a click or a press of a key, news can spread much quicker and further than the extra of Ninoy’s day. But there was a certain feeling of importance and significance attached to such endeavors in those days. It was an organizational and institutional thing, nothing so impersonal as it is today.