Twenty-five years, and we are still here

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

I walked into this office in August 2002 looking for a job to tide me over before I went back to school. Lemuel Fernandez and Limuel Celebria interviewed me that morning and asked the kind of questions you do not expect from a regional newsroom — political leanings, ideological orientation, whether I understood that a newspaper should do more than survive on gossip, scandal, and crime. I gave the answers I had. I never went back to school. Twenty-five years on, the building has changed three or four times, the people around me have come and gone, and the paper has somehow refused to die. That last part still surprises me on the days it shouldn’t.

When you run a community newspaper in this country, you learn quickly that survival is not a metaphor. The 15th and the 30th of every month arrive whether the advertising does or not. There were stretches in the early years when payroll arrived only because someone was willing to discount a postdated check, or because the publisher’s family quietly closed the gap that advertising couldn’t. None of that ever made the masthead. All of it is the reason there is a masthead.

The temptation, on an anniversary, is to write a victory lap. I am not going to do that. A regional paper in the Philippines that reaches 25 years has not won anything. It has simply refused to leave.

The numbers explain why that refusal matters. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 puts overall trust in news here at 38 percent. Reporters Without Borders ranks the Philippines 116th of 180 countries on the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, with a score of 49.57 — still classified as a “difficult” environment, even after the 18-spot jump from last year. RSF’s economic indicator hit its lowest point in the index’s history this year, which is the polite way of saying that newsrooms everywhere are being financially strangled. RSF found that in 160 of 180 countries, media outlets achieve financial stability “with difficulty,” or “not at all.” None of this is abstract to anyone who has ever stared down a bimonthly payroll in Mandurriao.

The same Reuters report is worth lingering on, because it carries something newsrooms our size should hear. Filipino respondents, asked how the press could regain their trust, answered with a list that reads like a checklist a community paper already lives by — verifiable facts, multiple sourcing, fact-checking, disclosure of sources, balanced reporting, and journalists present on the ground rather than chasing algorithm-driven trends. When asked where they go to verify a suspicious claim, the largest share — 38 percent — said a news source they trust. AI chatbots came in last, at 9 percent. Trust, in other words, is still earned the slow way. There is no shortcut, and there has never been one.

What we have done for 25 years is show up. Cover the City Council or provincial board sessions even when nothing happens. Write the police blotter. Run the Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index numbers when local governments would rather we didn’t. Print the Jefferson Tan kidnapping story when a regional police director was on the phone telling us to hold it. There were death threats. There was, on at least one occasion, an attempt on a life. There were also nights the paper went out only because somebody on the desk would not go home. None of that is heroic. It is the job.

We also dropped a letter on Senator Roding Ganzon’s “first public appearance” once and turned a routine political story into a case study in journalism classes from here to Bacolod. The missing L on the front page became, as the staff still jokes, our most widely read headline. I bring it up because credibility is not what you claim on an anniversary. It is what you defend after you have embarrassed yourself in 36-point type and kept going anyway. The day after the Ganzon headline ran, this paper printed an apology and a promise. We have been keeping that promise, more or less, ever since.

Mr. Fernandez used to ask one question on every controversial piece: can we defend this at Plaza Miranda? Meaning — if this story ends up in court, or in front of a hostile crowd, can we stand behind it on the facts? That standard is older than the internet, older than this paper, and it is the only currency I know that compounds. Twenty-five years of asking it is what got us here. It is also what every newsroom drift, in every era, eventually betrays. Reach metrics do not compound. Virality does not compound. Credibility does, slowly, and only if you are willing to lose stories rather than soften them.

I will say something, too, about the team that has shown up since. Rjay Castor, Mariela Oladive, and Juliane Judilla walked in as interns and decided, independently, not to leave. Glazyl Jopson holds down Negros Island Region effectively as a one-person bureau. Jennifer Rendon and Felipe Celino carry beats most national papers no longer staff. Joseph Marzan came in as a law student during the lockdowns, passed the Bar in 2025, and stayed.

Behind them is a deliberate institutional choice — to train rather than poach, to invest in fellowships and capacity-building with PCIJ, Rappler, Internews, and the European Union, and to bet that a regional paper which develops its own people will outlast one that rents bylines. That bet is slow, expensive, and invisible to anyone who only reads the front page. It is also, in my view, the most important editorial decision we make every year.

Imagine an Iloilo without fact-checkers. We would rather not. So we will be at the City Council, the Capitol, the police station after that, and the next day’s banner story will go through the same desk it always has, with the same question on every page proof.

We have been here 25 years. We intend to be here for the next one and beyond.