To see is to believe.
That truism has never been truer than at this moment –
this old fossil standing before you assigned to talk about the “evolution of
media.”
A fair warning to you then, old school as I am, I may
have to bore or even disappoint you, as my talk will be completely absent any
power point visual aid. It may even come way below your expectations as this is
no scholarly disquisition, not even an edifying lecture.
It is nothing more than a simple narrative of my
journalistic journey of over 50 years, from the printing press to AI, and
interesting things in between. Now, that is something indeed evolutionary. So, let’s
go back to the future.
Before I even started in mainstream journalism, I
already had some working exposure in the print medium as editor of our official
school publication at the then-Assumption College in the City of San Fernando.
Part of our senior staff’s duties was some sort of
apprenticeship at the printing press where we “put the paper to bed.” Literally,
in the sense that the bed is a flat surface inside the mechanical printing
press where the metal type is locked into place before rolling, a process
called newspaper typesetting.
A newspaper’s bed
In the old printing technique of Letterpress,
individual metal letters referred to as slugs are picked by hand to compose lines
of sentences and placed into a composting stick then laid on a bed
representing the page which is then inked and pressed directly into paper.
Composting stickFor photographs, the image is imprinted in magnesium
plate, commonly known in printing parlance as “cliché” which is laid out on the
bed with its corresponding story or text.
.jfif)
Proofreading
Before going into mass printing, each page had to be
proofread, of course. And this is the hard part. With the sample page as guide,
the proofreader will correct typo errors by pulling out the wrong letters with
tweezers. (tina-tyani mo bawat maling letra mula sa kahon and replacing them
with the correct slugs). You have no clue how tedious a task is this.
Linotype machine
So, it was no mere evolution but a veritable
revolution when the printing presses had their own Linotype machine
where the operator typed entire lines of slugs from molten lead. (hindi na
per letter ang laban, per line na). But still the bed stayed.
Offset printing
Highly revolutionary yet was Offset printing. Lead lines of text and photos are
assembled on physical boards using hot wax before photographing the page to
make a printing plate from where the image is transferred to rollers and then
onto paper. The Heidelberger Druckmaschinen lorded all over printed
media of this period.
Heidelberg press
And then of course, into your era, Digital
printing. Here, I cede knowledge to you.
So, that was how the news was printed. Now, how did it
get to be written and transmitted? This was how it was well into the ‘90s.
Ballpen, paper. Basic tools of the reporter. Add a
DLSR film camera for the photo-journalist. And not much later, a tape recorder
– starting with the open reel and then the cartridge, and the cassette – for
the broadcast journo.
At the editorial desks, the telephone and the
typewriter.
We start with the usual field coverage of all aspects
of life – for the provincial correspondent – from politics to business, from
crime to commerce, from sports to beauty pageants, religious events to
calamities, and the insurgency, as the provincial journalist is
all-beat-in-one.
Once the news story is penned, we look for the nearest
telephone, landline of course, the cellular phone came in much, much later.
No direct calls. You dial 0 for the operator, say you
want a press collect call to Manila, identify yourself, name the receiving
party and the phone number. The operator connects to the party on the other
line, asks if he accepts collect call from the sending party, if yes, you get
connected and start reading your story to him.
Trouble comes when the connection weakens or starts
getting garbled. We start going into phonetic alphabet, a standardized spelling
system used to communicate letters clearly over the phone or radio – Alpha,
Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo… Pity the poor desk editor, stiff neck and all from
cradling that phone on his neck while typing the story dictated over the line.
From the desk editor, the story is sent to the news
editor for disposition – to the wastebasket, or the layout.
For the provincial photo journalist – after taking
photos, he goes to a commercial photo studio to have his film developed into
negatives. He would choose the best shot and mark it in the negative, write
some caption about it, seal it in an envelope with the name and address of the
publication plus the name and number of the photo editor or chief of
photographers. He goes then to the bus terminal, pay freight cost, note the bus
number and time of departure and phone the desk with this info, so a copyboy
can retrieve the envelope once the bus arrives.
Fax machine
Much relief to the desk editors was the coming of the fax
machine where the news story gets scanned, transmitted to the desk and
printed over a telephone line. It made things easy too for the field reporter –
type your story, fax it, then just wait for its publication or airing. A
drawback though to this otherwise convenient development was what it spawned –
the uniformity of news stories obtaining in some beats, read: duplicate copies,
at worst plagiarized.
Press releases were routinely topped with headings
that indicate the recipient’s name, the sender’s name, the date of
transmission, and the news slug (what the story is about in 10 words at most).
Only different in headings, the same press release was sent to different
publications.
Even enterprise stories fell to this modus. All it took
was a correction fluid and retyping of the heading, the addressee, and the sender. We had a word for
this – Snopake journalism.
Correction fluid
An essential part of the newsroom – the nucleus of
publications and broadcasts – is the teletype machine that printed wire
service news feeds from agencies like the AP, UPI, AFP, Reuters, Agencia EFE,
Kyodo.
Teletype machine
At every office across the country of the PNA, our own
wire service agency, the teletype machine not only received news from its own
network and foreign wires, but also transmitted news by combining a typewriter
keyboard with electro-mechanical printing and a 5-bit binary electrical pulse
system sent over wires. Amid the constant clatter of the machine, built-in
bells would ring for urgent priorities like a flash report or breaking news
that would interrupt ongoing transmissions.
The dot.com era rendered the teletype machine obsolete
and opened the internet floodgates – email, online publications, social media,
blogs and vlogs, Facebook, meta, tiktok, AI, and all that they entailed. Yours
is this media era most manifest today. Ours has long passed.
Even memory now is hard-pressed recalling how it was
with local media, even if only dating to the foundation of the Central Luzon
Media Association in 1978. Those clearly remembered, in print:
In Pampanga: Pampanga Newsweek and The Voice, and
immediately thereafter Pampanga Times, Luzon Herald Tribune, Pampanga Journal,
Town Crier, onto Central Luzon Times and The Angeles Sun.
In Bulacan: The Reflector, the first broadsheet paper
in CL, and Mabuhay.
In Tarlac: Tarlac Star
In Zambales: Olongapo News
In Nueva Ecija: Monday Mail and Dahong Palay
In Bataan: The Freeport Mail
For radio stations: DZYA and DZAP in Angeles City;
DZTC and DZXT in Tarlac City; DWNE in Cabanatuan City; and DZYZ, DZOR, and DWGO
in Olongapo City. Note that the broadcast media was city-centered.
The good old days, as I remember them.
An old curmudgeon, most definitely, I am. But a
Luddite – one opposed to new technology – thoroughly I am not.
It has surprised a lot of young journalists to know
that old school as I am, I still get to use AI. It is not how it is defined
though as artificial intelligence. All me is AI: Ako Ito.
That is what has remained constant through the
evolution in media that I have been most fortunate to live through, adhering to
what I have embraced since high school as my very own article of faith as a
journalist. First uttered in 1644 – at the time the monarchies possessed and
exercised divine rights -- but it speaks as true, and with even greater
resonance, in this age of AI – this is Areopagitica, John Milton’s
impassioned philosophical defence of the principle of the right to freedom of
speech and expression, thus:
“Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to
play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing
and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple;
who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?
… For who
knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor
stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the
defences that Error uses against her power: give her but room, and do not bind
her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true…”
Into whatever media may evolve,
may we always speak Truth.
(From the
author’s talk: The Evolution of Media, SBMA-CLMA-CLMCC Media Training Seminar
on "Cyberspace and Artificial Intelligence: Media Ethics and
Accountability," 30 Sept. 2026, Subic Bay Freeport. All photos grabbed from the web. CTTO. No copyright infringement intended.)
NG Photograpy
.JPG)
