Life on the Beat: Manila City Hall
Life on the Beat – What Journalism Students Saw
Manila City Hall:
A price to pay for independence
By Jam Marie Y. Razal
The number of factions among reporters in the Manila City Hall beat changes from time to time. According to Raymund Antonio of Manila Bulletin, there are at this time three, namely, the pro-administration reporters who stay in the Press Information Office (PIO) and are close to the City Hall staff, the Manila City Hall Reporters’ Association (MACHRA), and the small group headed by senior reporter Tony Macapagal of Manila Standard Today.
Antonio says the reporters in the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Press Office also cover the City Hall, apart from NBI and Manila Police District. They are the reporters from The Philippine Star, The Daily Tribune, and The Manila Times. Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Tina Santos covers City Hall exclusively but opts to stay in the NBI Press Office. Antonio stays inside the PIO since the Bulletin is known to be pro-administration. However, Ricky Sunga, MACHRA member and Balita reporter, said there are only two factions, the oppositionist MACHRA and Tony Macapagal’s small group.
Aling Amelia’s coffee
The PIO is inside the Mayor’s Office. It has two separate rooms, a main room which provides the press releases and documents pertaining to the mayor, and an extension room which I wasn’t able to peep into.
Inside the main room are a lot of tables and chairs, and two computers. The room is very cool and the personnel very friendly and helpful. There are about 10 of them, including the head, Bojo Sta. Maria, and two official photo-graphers of the mayor. One of them is Jomar Lagmay, a correspondent photographer for Balita.
Antonio, who was newly assigned to the beat, says he is like an in-house reporter. In fact, he is the only reporter who stays inside the PIO to write stories, uses the computer, and makes and receives phone calls. Antonio wears decent and presentable clothes. He gets free coffee from Aling Amelia (the woman with 21 children who was featured in the TV program Rated K). Antonio was the first to write about Aling Amelia’s story which was published on May 20, 2005. He joked that he didn’t get any incentive from the Bulletin for writing the story.
Antonio is extra close and friendly to the staff of PIO. He gets press releases faster than anyone else and these releases are printed in toto in the Bulletin’s pages the next day. The first day I saw him, his girlfriend was seated next to him while he was writing his story. He also frequently calls Tina Santos of the Inquirer to compare notes and ask questions. He is also close to Sta Maria and I recalled that he asked him for a copy of the ordinance changing the name of the Central Colleges of Manila to the Universidad de Manila. In turn, Sta. Maria borrowed Antonio’s recorder. Antonio also asked for Sta. Maria’s help and that of two other PIO staff regarding a feature story on Manila’s pasyalan, which was assigned to him by his editor. He is also a member of MACHRA but since his paper is pro-administration, he is to write accordingly.
At the NBI
I decided to check out the NBI Press Office to see what information I could get there. Upon approaching the entrance desk, a guard smiled at me and asked where I was going. When I answered “Sa press office po,” he immediately dropped the smile and said, “Diyan lang,” without specifying where that “diyan lang” is.
Reporters cover the NBI usually in shirt and jeans. They have no fixed schedule.  Tina Santos of the Inquirer goes around City Hall and the courts in the morning to get stories and then proceeds to the NBI to write them. She has a good relationship with the Bulletin’s Antonio since their newspapers are the only broadsheets that report City Hall stories exclusively. They always call up each other and ask about each other’s stories.
Santos does not rely solely on press releases and her paper rarely uses these. She has a quota of two stories per day but some of her stories are not published the next day. She checks information mostly by calling up sources. Almost all the reporters bring their own laptops since the press office has only one computer. When I was there, I saw them giving their share in the payment of their water supply.
MACHRA’s room
MACHRA started during the time of former Mayor Alfredo Lim. Bert Peña, a reporter for dzME, recalls the time when the office was still comfortable and well-maintained. In Lim’s time, he says, their refrigerator was always filled with food. Now, only bottles of water are stored in the freezer; the lower storage does not even work anymore.
The room used to be cool; now it is very hot since the air-con has not been working very well for a year now. There used to be a lot of computers; now only one computer is working. Vice Mayor Danilo Lacuna (who ran under Fernando Poe Jr.’s party) gave them a new one.
A maintenance staff would frequently clean the room but now it is dirty and cluttered. The room is big but there is a lot of unused space. And the comfort room—it could hardly be called or used as such because of the dirt, unused utensils, dust, old cartons, and pieces of wood that fill it.
A mint green sofa matches the lighter shade of the walls but it is so worn out. Peña reasons that all this came about when the MACHRA reporters wrote about Mayor Lito Atienza’s “pagpapalayas sa mga taong-grasa” and transferring them to Antipolo. Since then, the mayor has reportedly cut off their phone lines and did nothing to replenish the content of their ref. Their electric bill is paid by Vice Mayor Lacuna. But some reporters were said to have heeded the call of Atienza to join his ranks. These reporters are the ones who receive electric fans or sacks of rice during Christmas, according to Peña.
MACHRA is composed mostly of reporters in their late 20s or early 30s. They wear casual though decent clothes (except for Peña who wears a sando and slippers) and treat the office like home or as tambayan. When they are all in the office, they are noisy and they fool around. They also welcome a lot of visitors (both work- and non-work related) and family members.
The stories
Most MACHRA members are reporters for tabloids and radio. Some of them do not only cover City Hall and the courts but also other beats. They just consider the office as home base where they can meet and write their stories.
Peña is one of the mainstays in the office. He receives faxed press releases from the Department of Labor and Employment, the Department of Public Works and Highways, the Department of Health, and the Bureau of Immigration. After reading these releases, he condenses the reports and translates them to Filipino. He calls up dzME to give the topic and summary of the report and in just a few minutes he is on-air reading his report. He does this from the dirty CR, the only place inside the office where there is a radio signal.
Ricky Sunga, MACHRA member and Balita reporter, says that because journalists have their own laptops, they do not need to go to the office everyday to write their stories. Some stay home and e-mail their stories to their offices.
Sunga says MACHRA keeps an adversarial stance in the beat. True enough, the headline of his story read, “JASHS (Jose Abad Santos High School), bubuwagin para gawing mall.” Surprisingly, no broadsheet reported this. Sunga says the PIO has been harboring a grudge against him since he wrote about Atienza’s handing out of money in his office before the elections. According to him, the story earned him a slap in the face from one of Atienza’s guards.
Other reporters followed up the JASHS story. Cesar Barquilla of Remate wrote, “Maynila lugi ng P2.5-B sa pagbenta ng JASHS.” Sunga told me he basically wrote this story and gave it to Barquilla. Unfortunately, the story that he worked on was not published in Balita while Barquilla’s story came out in Remate. He repeated the same act of generosity when Gemma dela Cruz of Pilipino Star Ngayon was not in the office again. He practically wrote the story and faxed it to her.
Since Sunga’s newspaper is regarded as pro-administration, some of his stories are not published. Still, he says, some are “nakakalusot.”
While the stories by MACHRA members are critical, they are poorly written. There are grammatical errors—inconsis-tency in tense, typographical errors, and lots of unnecessary words. Reporters do not double-check their stories before submitting these to their editors. They also have to take turns in using the computer.
Come one, not all
Beat reporters roam City Hall to look for stories. Stories are guaranteed on Tuesday and Thursday when the City Council of Manila holds sessions. But Sunga admits that when one MACHRA member covers the sessions, the others will not go there anymore. They will just copy that reporter’s story.
They also get stories from the courts in City Hall.
Mayor Atienza calls for press conferences but not frequently. Sunga says MACHRA reporters like him are rarely invited to these conferences because Atienza wants only the “good news” to be written.
Some broadsheet reporters rely on press releases and photo releases from the Mayor’s Office like Manila Standard Today, Malaya, and Bulletin. Although some words are changed or paraphrased, they are still the same releases. Tabloids also use press releases. Some translate them to Filipino and delete the last few paragraphs; others use them only if they are big stories. Sunga also said that PIO head Sta. Maria chooses the reporters to give stories to.
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