In a media environment lorded over by radio stations that have wide audience reach and strong influence on the public pulse, English-language newspapers are trying to survive, their sphere of influence reduced to a fraction of the Iloilo population—professionals, the academe, business community and politicians.

For an upstart like the two-year-old The Visayas Examiner, the situation is even more grim. Five other existing newspapers provide it with fierce competition against the backdrop of a generally conservative posture of the business community and the stifling stance of local political interests that see them as willing tools to amplify their interests.

The post-war years saw many politicians establishing or supporting newspapers in order to attack their enemies and further their political ambitions. Today, the politicians’ hands are less seen because they have retreated to the background until the next election campaign season. Their hold on the newspapers is more in the form of government advertisements, which are the lifeblood of local newspapers. It is common for their paid press releases to become banner stories or land in the front pages of newspapers.

Conscious of this fact, TVE has tried to position itself as an alternative newspaper that practices good journalism—not beholden to powers-that-be and one that cares for its readers and communities.

“We strive to be the paper that readers in our communities would regard with affection. Our editors, news reporters, columnists and contributors prepare the daily issues with the needs and values of these communities in mind,” says Diosa Labiste, its editor-in-chief.

TVE started as a weekly publication but later, and with audacity, (which the owners regretted later) decided to become a daily. The daily publication lasted for six months and TVE again retreated to become a thrice a week newspaper because, among others, there was no windfall of advertisements to support the growing overhead expenses and sustain its expansion plans.

Network television stations and cable television, though only around in the last three decades, have overtaken the local newspapers in audience reach and influence, eating up advertisements intended for latter. Such a situation is a greater challenge to TVE as it tries to fit itself in a media community that has yet to connect with the community and vice versa.

Citizens groups abound but they share an uneasy relationship with the media. For them, the media are just outlets of their advocacy, a mere afterthought in their activities. When the media committed journalistic sins of unfair, inaccurate reporting and corruption, citizens groups are not vigilant enough to call the media’s attention to such excesses.

On the other hand, the media often treat citizens groups as only one of the many news sources they have. When some groups raise a howl about media corruption and injustice in their dealings, news organizations would rather view such criticisms with suspicion. Instead of calling for renewal within the ranks, media practitioners would often hit back at their critics, thinking they have just been misunderstood. Citizens have yet to find the guts to talk back to the media in Iloilo.

In December 2000, The Visayas Examiner affirmed its adherence to public journalism in an organization workshop sponsored by the Evelio B. Javier Foundation (EBJF). Some of its staff members were introduced to the concept of public journalism in earlier seminars and study tours organized by EBJF and its partners. But it was during the workshop that TVE was able to come up with a vision and mission statement that clarified its role as a community newspaper. From there, the paper gladly took up the challenge to try public journalism projects.

If there was not a hint of hesitation among TVE’s writers and editors, it was because there was already a consensus to try new ways of doing things, apart from the traditional detachment of media in the community. But given limited resources and organization problems, the TVE decided to embark on small-scale public journalism projects that would not get in the way of its daily work and deadlines.

In June, the paper carried stories on the hazards posed by an incinerator at a state-run hospital in Iloilo City. The noxious odor and thick smoke spewed by the waste facility have affected households and communities near the hospital. The issue was brought to public attention when a resident, Diana Magbanua, complained that her family suffered from chronic respiratory ailment from inhaling the smoke from the incinerator, some ten meters away from her home.

TVE covered the story extensively by interviewing the complainants and health and environment officials. It also linked with Greenpeace International-Philippines, an international environmental activist group that has been studying the ill effects of incinerators. Its series of special reports and articles on the issue resulted in petition letters calling for the scrapping of the waste facility, dialogs between the hospital officials and the affected households, and an investigation conducted by Department of Health officials from Manila.

The linkage with Greenpeace provided TVE writers with a better background on the issue and the alternatives to incineration. The environment watchdog group sent related literature and provided Internet resources to help in shaping the incineration story. A research provided by Greenpeace noted that the facility is one of the 26 incinerators—second hand rejects that have already been phased out because they cannot meet environmental standards—bought by the government from Austria.

But TVE wanted to go beyond the traditional role of a newspaper, from a neutral communicator to a facilitator and initiator of dialog between key actors in the controversy.

“The news stories can only carry so much information and it is far from interactive. To connect the news sources with the readers, we decided to hold an activity where the news sources or the experts meet the TVE readers in the flesh,” Diosa says.

In August 2000, TVE held a forum “The Burning Question: Why Incineration is not the Solution.” The forum brought the US-based Dr. George Emmanuel, Ph.D., who did studies on incineration and other waste facilities in the US and Von Hernandez, campaign director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia based in Manila, to discuss incineration and its alternatives. Both speakers received good ratings from the audience composed of 43 participants from public and private hospitals, government agencies, business groups, academe, and environmentalist groups.

Twenty journalists from local communities around Mindanao will be participating in a training workshop on trafficking in persons at the Waterfront Insular Hotel in Davao City July 12-14, 2007.  The workshop is the first in a series to be conducted by the Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD) in partnership with The Asia Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The workshop is a major component of the project Strengthening Community Media Capacity to Address Trafficking in Persons and is open to selected print and radio journalists who have at least five years’ experience working in the provinces either as freelances or staff of news organizations.  The next two workshops will be conducted in Luzon and the Visayas in late 2007 and by mid-2008.

Community journalists who participated in the training workshops will be asked to submit story proposals.  Selected proposals will be supported with modest grants from the project and stories will be published in the respective news outlets of the journalists and in the CCJD website which will have a special Trafficking in Persons section. (Ma. Diosa Labiste, The Visayas Examiner)