RAMIREZ
Today marks the 19th year of existence of Cebu Daily News, and I am very fortunate to be a part of the paper from its inception in 1998.
Although my love affair with CDN was interrupted when I joined the academe in 2010, my heart was never detached from the paper until I was again given a chance to write a column starting last year.
The newsroom scene of February 7, 1998 was still vivid in my mind. Everyone was busy and excited attending to their respective assignments when suddenly a blast was heard coming from a transformer of the Visayan Electric Co. (Veco) located behind the old CDN office along Escario Street.
All the reporters present in the newsroom at that time, including me, rushed to the scene to check the cause of the explosion, and there at the site was a child slumped on top of the elevated water tank.
The child was reportedly on top of the water tank to retrieve his kite when suddenly the string touched one of the high-tension wires. Luckily the child only suffered minor injuries.
I joined CDN as one of the pioneers, and was originally assigned as a business reporter. I was later transferred to the main news pages because my stories, according to the late managing editor Ivan Suansing, would crawl out from the business section to the other pages, including page 1.
From the business page, I was assigned to cover the election that year in the second district when a classmate in the seminary visited me at home and confided how politicians in Samboan town violated election laws by hanging a large tarpaulin claiming that the town was a bailiwick of a certain political party.
I was also assigned in City Hall and later on at the Capitol, and my last stint in the field was covering Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu before I was moved to the desk.
I was never prepared for any job in the newspaper because I did not receive any training in journalism, and the only reason I could think of why I was accepted as business reporter in CDN was my previous work in the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry as a media relations officer.
In fact from January 2 to February 7, 1998, I was on a rigid training courtesy of the late Ivan Suansing and accented with bits of inspirational talk from my senior reporters then, Nagiel Banacia and Froilan Gallardo.
At that time, I was literally taught about the inverted pyramid and other basics in journalistic writing.
Adjusting to journalism was not a problem to me because I was trained for service when I was still studying in the seminary. In fact journalism was the main reason why I abandoned the idea of me becoming a man of the cloth.
When I started exposing issues in the newspaper, I said to myself, this is already service to the people of God, and I don’t have to patiently wait to finish my formation since I could already be of service when I get to expose issues that mattered to the public.
As a young man some 19 years ago, it was here in CDN that I got the highest level of satisfaction in my life because I was literally able to give voice to voiceless and help bring to light things that many people wanted to hide.
These experiences with CDN had become the platform and mold for my current profession in the academe where, in my idealism, I set on a mission to train reporters who have a holistic understanding of the journalist’s role in society and those who would not succumb to the temptation of money while doing their job.
I was never wrong in working for a small paper that wielded substantial influence in shaping government policies and direction and also in trailblazing lots of new things for the local newspaper industry.