In many countries, 18 years usually means a “coming of age” period, that time of life when a person ends his or her adolescence and enters adulthood, albeit young adulthood.
In the US, for example, an 18-year-old person can afford to drive his or her own car, stay in his or her own pad and earn his or her own income. In fact, American parents expect their kids to be out on their own at 15 years old.
Those still dependent on their parents at 18 and beyond, unless physically and mentally challenged, are often looked down on, even ridiculed. Unlike in this country where Filipinos stay with their parents even after they’re married due to necessity since oftentimes they can’t support themselves at first.
Still at 18, one expects a person to have “gotten it together” and hurdled most, if not all, challenges on their way to adulthood. At 18, people expect a person to have a definite direction in life, even if he or she remains unemployed.
It remains to be seen here at Cebu Daily News whether we fit that “coming of age” bit into a T. Looking at all those photos and past stories as we prepared today’s anniversary issue made us feel that the 18 years spent were more like dog years than human years.
Either way, a decade and eight years worth of newspaper existence can weigh down heavily on the sturdiest of staffers, reporters, correspondents and editors even if some don’t admit it out loud for whatever reasons they hold unto themselves.
Then there is the emergence of new media, buoyed by the emergence of the Internet which became more accessible to the public and ushered in the likes of YouTube, a streaming video website, and Facebook and Twitter which broke new ground in media boundaries and challenged traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers for the audience’s attention.
What makes the job even tougher is that there is no guarantee that anyone will stay in the paper for the next decade or so. In the past few months, CDN saw some of its pioneers leave the newsroom to pursue other interests.
But there are returning veterans and others who stayed on, who continue to keep the faith and believe that regardless of the changing tides of life and the uncertainty of an industry that competes with others for public attention, Cebu Daily News continues to play a crucial role not only in informing the public, but also in shaping public opinion and policy and bridging the divide between the community it serves and the government that’s supposed to care for them.
It’s not an easy task and time may have eroded whatever luster and cachet it may have once held two or three generations ago, but it never was. What we in Cebu Daily News can only commit to you, our readers, is to give our best in our jobs.
There will be failures to be sure, but like everyone else, we pick ourselves up, wipe the dust off and soldier on.
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.
