By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
I shiver when I recall the days when we started this paper. The long hours of work, how difficult things were. Literally, it was like carrying drinking water from the base of the mountain all the way to the top where the village was.
Getting in touch with anybody anywhere in the Cordillera was really tough. Cellphones were heavy and big. Getting a clear signal was a challenge in Metro Manila. In Baguio it was almost a miracle to get in touch with the rest of the world with a cellphone. And whenever you got through, it was so expensive.
So getting an article from the provinces took a lot of trouble. They were sent by bus and a messenger had to be sent to the Dangwa bus station to pick up the hard copy. Then it was encoded. On Fridays, we had an army of encoders typing the articles. The day before that Atty. Cabalda, one of the guys who started this thing with me, would be going from office to office in the building telling the secretaries we would have a party the coming Friday. When they came, he would request them to type the articles. When we had money, we then would buy pizza for everyone. During difficult times, we would only give them a big smile and the sweetest “thank you very much in the world.”
That was just one of the million creative things we pulled from our bag of tricks in order to come out with an issue.
But we could not rely on the invited secretaries who could only stay for an hour or two. So typists were employed and, like everything else, their salaries added to the already high cost.
The encoding often added more to the grammatical mistakes in the articles. So whoever was editing a piece really had to go through it with a fine toothed comb in order to spot all the typos.
Floppy discs then were also so unreliable. You transfer an article from one computer to another and the article would vanish. It would have to be retyped again.
Same thing with computers. Move it a little bit and it would get disoriented and programs would have to be reinstalled.
When the typing was done, the articles are printed out through a laser printer (something special then) and then cut and pasted on a wide sheet to make it look like a newspaper. The it was shot through a giant camera and then the negatives were worked on again. When that is done, the platemaker continues the process to come up with metal plates which was like the stencil of a mimeographing machine. It was this one that got installed in a giant printing machine to come up with the newspaper.
Things were so laborious. It was practically hell.
Then computers, programs, printers got improved. But the best game changer was the advent of the internet. Now articles can be easily emailed from the nooks and crannies. No encoding. Processes in the printing press also improved.
All told, everything got easier at very much lower costs.
Moral of this actual story is, embrace and make use of technology to your advantage. If you are resistant to this, you must be nuts.**
