SENATOR Manuel “Mar” Roxas II was the keynote speaker at Media Nation, which was held in Clark, Pampanga and which I blogged about while the event was ongoing.
He quipped that it was hard to be the keynote speaker when you’re the last one to give your speech — and the one keeping people from having their dinner, heh. He also joked that he felt a bit like being led into the lion’s den, since the event was a gathering of a virtual Who’s Who in Philippine journalism (in my case it was probably more like: “And this is one of our editors, Joey Alarilla.” “Who?” heh), with major print, TV, radio and online publications represented. (On a more personal note, it also became a mini-UP Tinta reunion for me as Dodge Dillague, formerly of GMA 7 and now a director at ABC 5, and Philippine Daily Inquirer reporter Alcuin Papa, are my orgmates.)
What’s funny is that the senator said he would like to start his reflection on the state of political reportage in the Philippines by talking about hope, and then alluding to the Hope controversy, heh. OK, we all saw it coming, but it was still good enough for a few laughs.
Here’s the clip from our INQUIRER.net Videos YouTube channel.
We had a quick dinner because we had to hop on the shuttle that would take us back to Manila, and while talking about the Hope controversy — this was Saturday, when Hope was dominating the airwaves — I smiled and asked a fellow journalist if he thought the Hope television interview would become front page news in the newspapers the next morning.
We all knew what the answer would be, but he just smiled and said, “Let’s see.”
Of course, predictably — and I say that with all sadness — it was front page news on Sunday in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which had “Hope steals show in real-life soap” by Bayani San Diego Jr., and the Philippine Star, with “Hope says sorry to Kris” by Ricky Lo. No offense to the other publications, but PDI and Star are the only print newspapers I actually get to read, and even then only rarely — in this case because my mother-in-law brought home these two papers last Sunday.
Also, you might have noticed that while “Hope steals show in real-life soap” was a front page PDI story, when it came out online we placed it in our Showbiz and Style channel which includes the Inquirer Entertainment section. Again, this goes to show that PDI and INQUIRER.net are separate companies, each with its own Editorial department, so you’ll find cases in which we’ll agree to disagree on how to treat a story that comes out on print, apart from the fact that we generate a lot of original online content.
Also, in the case of the Philstar story, I linked to the cached page on Google — the archived links to the article seem to be unavailable and I’m not really sure how Philstar deals with its old stories, so if somebody from Philstar reads this, maybe you could point me to the right link.
I’m also curious about what people think of showbiz news making it to the front page of newspapers, so feel free to leave a comment or send me a link to your entry if you’ve blogged about this issue.
