By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The message of Lettie Pilando, a sis in the Igorot group in our college days, the other day got me going. “You are still in the healing mode so take it easy. . . . . Your dreams/plans for Zigzag is providing you lots of positive energy and inspiration—much to look forward to.”
It hurtled me back down memory lane. All the way when ZigZag Weekly was conceptualized.
It was a cool early evening in December of 1996. We just had dinner then in a resto at Makati Ave., Makati City, then we sauntered over to a Japanese restaurant across the street for some simmering brewed coffee. We were relaxed then as office work was over for the year and how to spend our Christmas break was the only thing bugging us.
We were three then, two were UP Law graduates practicing law in Makati City. The muse of the group was a Fulbright ESL scholar who was on vacation from the US. All of us being Cordillerans and were OK, we wanted to give back to the region. In the midst of the caffeine-laced laughter from our silly jokes, we came up with the idea of coming up with a regional newspaper.
We also came up with the battle cry for it—“News as it should be. The good, the bad and the ugly.” Some operational preliminaries were also discussed along with so many other things. Then it was time to call it a night and we got up to head for Baguio where the tune of “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” was already playing everywhere.
A day or two after, we looked for the napkin where the notes were jotted down, and our muse was surprised. “Oh! That was not a joke?” Luckily, she found it. And the first issue of ZigZag Weekly came out with no budget about four days after, the first Sunday of that year.
Having put up by Cordillerans, we know this region by heart, so ZigZag Weekly vibrates its heart and soul.
This resulted in the inevitable. At 31years old now with me laft alone long ago to run it and the first 20 years best described by disastrous financial losses (for context, the most popular paper then in the region took all of 30 years to hit break even point), ZigZag Weekly is now the oldest surviving local newspaper around, with the most circulation and widest coverage. In other words, it is the most entrenched in Cordillera peoples’ psyche. All the competition perished on the side due to the persistent difficult environment where people generally don’t read much anymore.
The moral of this whole thing is to remain in touch with positive thinking friends as they are the most possible source of life-giving inspiration when you are feeling down, and for some, when business is slow.**
