SMC: Media and business

The first thing any student of the University of the Philippines learns by heart is his or her student number. This multi-digit serial number begins with the year you entered the university followed by a series of numbers that is imprinted in your mind until you die.

That number stays with you along with your identification card that opens doors in the University system. Lose it and you might as well forget any and all privileges requiring official identification.

Three decades after graduation I have long lost my student ID and could not remember my serial number for many years, that was until I went back to the University to attend a forum sponsored by San Miguel Corporation on “Media and Business”.

As I stepped up to fill in the registration sheet, they asked for my student number! Like a man facing death, I saw my life pass before me. This unexpected replay was not my doing. My mind had gone on overdrive responding to a command that triggered years of training.

In the span of three, maybe four seconds, my brain coughed up my student number on command!

* * *

Not only did I retrieve my long forgotten student number, the San Miguel Forum also caused my mind to flash back on my first year at what was then called the UP-IMC or UP Institute of Mass Communication where I first heard of “Developmental Journalism” from dean Gloria Feliciano.

This particular branch of journalism specializes on the “developmental” needs of a nation. Developmental Journalism was supposed to carry relevant information concerning agriculture, public administration, community development and communications research.

In hindsight, the entire idea made a lot of sense.

Given the fact that we have an agriculture based economy, where the majority of the population is poor and relatively ignorant, Developmental Journalism could have contributed a lot in speeding up the distribution of information and knowledge.

There was not a lot of information back then and very little space in media was dedicated to Developmental Journalism, which made the whole idea unattractive to incoming students or fresh graduates. In terms of social reality, Developmental journalism was not popular because no one was comfortable about admitting that we live in a third world country.

Then, as now, both the academe as well as the industry was too mesmerized by western media. They were having a ball with Investigative Journalism rising out of the Vietnam War as well as the Watergate scandal. They were high featuring the counter culture of “flower power” crowd, acid rockers and rebel folk heroes.

No one was interested to do boring studies about Developmental Journalism.

Three decades later we still find Philippine media copying the experiments as well as the mistakes of western media. Sadly, instead of maintaining its independence by vocation or through legislation, most media organizations and products have been acquired by businesses bigger than them.

Most media outfits have “gone to bed” with politicians by giving them air time, shows or programs in exchange for favors, clout or advertising paid for with taxpayers money.

Most have adopted “Tabloid Journalism” as a model for determining what is news and how the news is presented.

Against this backdrop, it is encouraging to see forums where companies, such as San Miguel Corporation, promote an alternative perspective or suggestion. Instead of joining the bandwagon promoting Tabloid Journalism and the “idiotization” of Filipinos, why not venture into the world of Business Journalism?

Why not, indeed!

Considering that all the politics and exposé have amounted to little or practically nothing in terms of conviction and institutional change, it is time for media as a whole to rethink priorities, programming as well as the amount of space and page we spend on “non-productive” and “non-profitable” stories.

Instead of snapshots and sound bytes, we should spend more time and space elaborating on entrepreneurship, financial management and investment, social media as business tools, explaining how to put up businesses and sound business development.

For the longest time, Business Journalism has been confined to the realm of the stock market, banking, and international trading. Business journalists speak mostly to big business people who use a lingo that would be the equivalent of a foreign language.

Yes, we have the Internet, but Filipinos still bank on “trust” and information that applies to Philippine reality and culture. I have dealt with so many western experts whose abilities I would not challenge in the US or Europe. But in the Philippines they would not last six months just trying to understand our cultural idiosyncrasies. 

While speaking at the forum, I myself stumbled upon a realization about journalists and business:

Long before I entered the world of media and journalists, my father Louie Beltran, and every journalist I knew of, always told people not to enter journalism unless they wanted to live in poverty. Through the years, the notion of poverty improved so now they just say, you will never be rich.

Why should our profession become the benchmark for poverty or living a life void of wealth? I personally believe that the “poverty” line was some employers’ excuse not to pay the right wages for people who risk their lives as journalists.

I told the handful of UP students that journalists are “poor” not because we take a vow of poverty but simply because, just like many Filipinos, we were not taught at home and in our schools how to create wealth, manage our finances and have complementing plans for our career and our family. In like manner we did not grow up having an appreciation for “Business”.

That alone is why media should focus on business not on politics.

San Miguel deserves praise for this project and they should raise the bar by enlarging the project into an “Inter-university” scale so more students can learn.