Newspapers

With Manong Max’s passing, yet another giant of Philippine journalism leaves the scene.

Mourning his death, I could not help contemplating the future of newspapers in this digital age. It has been fashionable to write eulogies for the print medium. Yet, somehow the medium persists.

I suspect Manong Max knew why.

I know of no other person so thoroughly committed to the print medium – and to the machine age. To his last piece, Manong Max wrote with a typewriter, defying all the conveniences of the word processor and email.

There is inspiring beauty in the clatter of that ancient machine for producing prose. It makes you write with a certain cadence – that cadence that is so evident in Manong Max’s prose. He wrote unremittingly, a man confident in his capacity to think things through.

And that prose, spilling all over the editorial pages, stamped Manong Max’s personality on this paper.

Some might not agree with Manong Max’s pervasive presence in this paper. But I always suspected there was a certain wisdom to that.

In the mornings, I do not usually go to my computer, work my mail and read the blogs. Instead, with the slowest possible pace, I make a pot of coffee and unfurl the papers. That is the best part of the day: the mind is fresh and the pages of the newspaper are crisp.

Now I have a clearer idea about why I enjoy lingering with the papers first.

The stuff on email is either too casual or too frantic. The blogs are constantly ranting – and unmediated by an editor I respect or a publisher I trust. They are unaccountable, and often poisoned.

Large doses of ranting blogs ruin the equanimity of my mornings. The emails are voices coming out of little tunnels, each speaking to one micro-community or the other.

Newspapers, by contrast, are expansive. They look at the entire horizon. Some crusty editor worked late the previous night to evaluate all the news that is fit to print, assess their comparative importance and deals with the mass of information critically.

Television, especially cable news television, will beat newspapers to the punch anytime. They do not bring the news fresh. They bring the news live. In real time, without the benefit of editing.

But television is slave to the visuals of the news. It cannot be too abstract. It cannot zoom out too much, look at the context at the expense of the imagery. The context does not always lend itself to visual richness, which is the predisposition of this medium.

To be sure, television is accessible. They are everywhere. The television crew, not the notepad-toting print journalist, is the icon of the Fourth Estate. The news readers, all primped up, not the crumpled deskman, are the heroes of what is visible in journalism.

Newspapers do not have the same proclivity for the colorful image and the fast pace of real-time reporting. The medium lends itself more to the concepts that underpin events, the keys to our understanding them.

Newspapers are not fleeting. They cannot afford to be trite. They are the best defense against handy soundbites overrunning the moment.

In the papers, the news is not raw and random. The news is well crafted, thoroughly reviewed by a string of deskmen and night editors. And evaluated for relative importance.

The difference between getting news from television and getting the same from the papers is not marginal. Getting news from television is like grabbing a burger on the run. Getting the news from the papers is like fine dining.

Getting the news from television is like instant coffee. Newspapers deliver a well-percolated blend.

Time, of course, is a luxury. Broadcast delivers the news while we run about doing the endless errands of our busy lives. In a round-the-clock world, broadcast news is indispensable. And newspapers must deserve the leisure our readers allow us.

Competition from broadcast, with the its advantage of urgency, defines what newspapers should evolve into. The front pages must gather both facts and context and weave them well to the reader’s satisfaction. The news in print, coming hours after they have broken in broadcast, must be more and more analytical.

There is little space in broadcast to suitably represent the range of opinions about every issue that emerges. Representing that range, given the limitations of the broadcast media, will court information overload and thus make very little sense to the viewer or the listener.

But print can deliver that range to the intelligent reader. The richness of the editorial spread rests on the diversity of views it is able to capture.

And newspaper opinion, unlike the blogs, are accountable and on record. One can complain to the publisher, the editor or, as is unique in this paper, complain directly to the public through the Inbox section.

It is reassuring that the distinct trend has been that commentators in the blogs respond to newspaper opinion rather than the other way around.

Manong Max well understood the advantages of this persistent medium. He gave this paper a face and a personality. His opinions resonated. His sense of what is important in the news of the day permeated the pages.

We will miss him sorely, no doubt.

But, and I am sure this is more important to him, we will persist in this medium: crafting the news expertly and delivering opinion that resonates. This is, after all, the medium of record and the forum of wide consensus.