The challenge of transition

BUSINESSWORLD MARKS its 25th year today with its founder, Raul L. Locsin, hovering about in his ghostly constitution. I definitely sense it and feel deservingly visited; after all, I consented to step into this pair of extra-large publisher’s shoes he had left and have worn them into this moment of supreme challenge.

Concede it or not, we, along with the rest of the newspaper club, are passing into history; the only question is when we will arrive there. All of us mortal subjects of time naturally grow old and go; something happens around us and, consequently, to us. And in our particular case and time, it’s technology.

We’ve seen its like come and go. Counting the 20-year run of our own forerunner, Business Day, we’ve gone from hot-metal to photographic to digital publishing, but, always, we have published with ink and published on paper—ink and paper, indeed, constitute a newspaper. Now they’re both going out in the plain, inexorable cost-realities of supply and demand; unreplenished, their very source is going—trees.

But, more than any other factor, it is technology that’s deciding for us. It’s not, by the way, anything like the technology we’ve seen come before and rearrange our world, the sort, for instance, that brought us our movies, our radio, and our television; it’s technology, rather, that has in fact opened a whole new world, one beyond dream-like, such that, if you don’t ever wake up from it, it becomes your new reality.

It is cyberworld, a world our very business, news and information, and profession, journalism, are proving particularly made for.

It’s a world that does not discriminate, however, between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the genuine and the pseudo; in fact it is open to everyone: there, anyone who wants to say anything—whether worth saying or not—to anyone else or to a certain audience or to the public at large can set up shop (“site”) and proceed to do so. Journalism, a practice that, until cyber world, has been closely organized and vetted in layer upon layer of checks, thus becomes not only cheapened but dangerous—indeed a potential weapon of mass misinformation.

In any case, there’s just no escaping it: it’s the new information environment, it’s the new market, it’s the new deal. If therefore they wish to go on, newspapers have no choice but to operate in it, shift from paper and ink to screen and in time refashion itself for not simply reading but for watching and listening as well. But if they have been true to their profession they should have credibility on their side, which is what precisely news and information are about.

We at BusinessWorld cannot thank Raul Locsin enough for building it on the rock of public trust. And lest his physical absence inspire any illusions, BusinessWorld is and shall remain his paper, and we who continue to be, or have come to be, a part of it are mere caretakers of his legacy.

You can imagine what discomfort, what burden, what ghost, we his survivors have to deal with every day we put his paper together.

Standing to his full six feet, as his mother had drilled into him (“Before you even dream of touching the stars, you must, first, stand straight”), was how he appeared in life. Now, from the afterlife, he seems to me to appear even larger, and oftener. But, as uncomfortable as I feel in his shoes, I’m only grateful to be alerted by his ghost, especially with the challenge of transition upon us.

Oops! In my previous piece, about the editor Benjamin Defensor, a “sour” mistake due to misplaced spacing has occurred. Lest our dear, recently departed friend’s rest be disturbed, the correction is made here with absolute remorse, the entire paragraph reprinted, the incorrect phrase in it set right in brackets, and both the mistake and the correction italicized for quick spotting:

A sour [As our] managing editor, he led us—copyeditors, rewrite persons, and headline and caption writers—in putting the paper together. He set the work pace, a fast one; he always sent the paper to the press well ahead of deadline. How the proofreaders managed to make out his physician’s scrawl, I presupposingly ascribed to some study of pharmacy.