Two years after the pandemic, we woke up to a different world. We have to pick up the pieces of our lives. In addition for us, we have to pick the pieces of this paper. We have already started and we are now on our way in a new beginning, with you of course.
Of late, people have been breathing, eating and sleeping with their favorite social media platforms. There is not much worry about the difference between validated news and the products of rumor mongers. To the majority, they are the same.
With these reality now, we in the traditional media have to start the difficult work of making people appreciate the big difference between talk about real things, people and events from the plain imaginations and hearsays, or double hearsays, or even spun several times over and then added to. The end result is the truth becomes upside down or totally false. Every step of the whole process has bred new money makers in an industry not familiar to those who learned things the traditional way.
Now students can finish a semester or two without even being within the four walls of a library. All they need are an internet connection and a laptop or a smart cell phone.
Inability to make head or tails from these makes one the equivalent of a dinosaur, unable to do business in a competitive way. Or he or she might as well go back to farming with the use of a plough and a carabao.
We in the media now have to hurtle ourselves to the modern ways of doing things. News and accompanying information aids are not anymore typed and encoded through rudimentary programs like Word Star. Those were already dead and buried. News cycles are not anymore measured in days or even hours but in minutes or even seconds.
With this issue of this paper, we are celebrating our 28th year as a real paper. We now do it with the daunting task of adjusting to the new realities. Facing them and dealing with them we have to. Otherwise, we might as well go the way of the Dodoo.
We have no intention to. Right here, with this issue, we have already decided on the right choice. To face the challenges.
It will not be easy. But we will survive as we did the past 27 years. We have to, as you also must. We will be with you every step of the way. With us, you should be better equipped.**