Rose Caoile of Houston, Texas, was feeling homesick.

It was Sinulog day and she was thousands of miles away. It was years ago when she had her last Sinulog where she danced on the streets to the beat of the drums. She missed Cebu.

Then, an idea struck her. She called her children to attach the computer to the audio component while she went to the Sun.Star website at www.sunstar.com.ph. She opened its Sinulog section, and-she was home again.

The sound of the drums filled her house. She and her children danced to the beat, as they prepared to hold a barbecue on the porch.

"Your photo gallery and the Sinulog beat really completed my day. Feeling namo na-a mi diha (we felt we were there) for the Sinulog," she wrote on the "My Sinulog" discussion board of the website.

Websites of national newspapers ignored the Sinulog but the Sun.Star website played the Sinulog beat non-stop, featured a photo gallery of the celebration and offered a timeline with accounts of events as they happened.

Interaction

Community newspapers with websites have the advantage of providing Filipinos abroad with news from their hometowns. An Internet presence for community newspapers is but one of the benefits brought about by technology.

Other benefits are the ease in reaching experts and news sources beyond geographical barriers, the new ways of delivering the news to mobile phones and personal digital assistants, and the facility for readers to send in their comments and interact with community newspapers.

A letter to the editor may be delivered in person or by courier.

Technology allows the public to send in feedback also by e-mail, as a text message to the editor's mobile phone or by posting a message on the feedback form on the newspaper's website.

Bobby Nalzaro, Sun.Star Cebu columnist and a broadcast journalist, knows this. He gets reactions by SMS (short message system or text messaging) on the same day that his column is published. In the past, he got comments only when he went to the newsroom or if the letters were published the next day or several days later.

Even press releases or statements are sent to newsrooms by e-mail.
Overall, both the public and the newspaper benefit from this interaction.
The ability to interact with community newspapers is vital to the readers they serve.

Community newspapers are critical because they can return to issues repeatedly.

Redefining community

The Bandillo ng Palawan, a weekly newspaper in Puerto Princesa City, is extending its community beyond the island of Palawan. Some 1,000 copies of the paper are printed weekly and distributed within the community.

But online, the newspaper's website at www.pto-princesa.com/bandillo reaches people worldwide. The sense of community is not lost but enhanced.

Sun.Star is able to extend its reach beyond the 12 cities where its community newspapers are located. Not only Cebuanos abroad visit the Sun.Star website but also those who trace their roots to the different provinces.

The website carries news from Manila, Baguio, Pangasinan and Pampanga in Luzon; Cebu, Dumaguete, Bacolod and Iloilo in the Visayas; and Davao, General Santos, Cagayan de Oro and Zamboanga in Mindanao.

Intermediate stage

Overseas Filipino workers tend to be hungry for news from home. Technology allows them to go beyond geographical barriers at a mouse click.

"Asians are voracious consumers of online news, especially diaspora populations scattered around the world in countries like the US and Europe. Their community-centric culture also translates well onto the online medium," says Madanmohan Rao, in the introduction to his book "News Media And New Media: The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook."

Voices that otherwise get ignored or are stifled in mainstream media have ways of surfacing too, thanks to technology.

One of the best things about technology is that it can provide a way to effectively bypass censorship by the state, says Cyril Pereira, a Hong Kong-based media specialist.

Independent

Pereira cites as an example the Malaysiakini.com experience, a purely online news operation, in Malaysia. The Malaysiakini.com's mission is to "publish an online newspaper that informs the Malaysian public of the latest news and critical issues in an independent and fair manner, and to facilitate discussion of current concerns, thereby challenging the views produced by the government-dominated mainstream media."

It is not only state censorship that the media can bypass, but also the biases of mainstream media for the dominant voice or the position of the powerful and the elite.

The MindaNews in Davao City has found the Internet to be the best medium for its brand of journalism. As a purely online news operation, it presents news about Mindanao on its website at www.mindanews.com that goes beyond the region's wars and conflicts.

Rising Internet access in Asia is creating more room and hunger for political debate and interest in "e-democracy" or in democratic processes made stronger by technology.

Even community issues like the assassination of a young human rights lawyer in Cebu, Philippines, in October 2004 generated an outpouring of grief and anger from people around the world. Cebuanos in different countries gave testimonials in an online memorial for slain lawyer Arbet Sta. Ana-Yongco on the Sun.Star website. Word spread quickly throughout an interconnected world on Cebu's loss.

"Embrace technology"

Philippine Press Institute executive director Jose Pavia Jr. says many Philippine community newspapers live a hand-to-mouth existence but still need to embrace technology to open new markets. He adds they must also provide support to their staff so that they can use the technology properly.

If community papers continue to rely on legal notices, they cannot make it. "You will need to invest. Money begets money. Those who will move from this level to that level must look at capitalization, not the type of funding that comes every three years," Pavia says, referring to the frequency of city and provincial elections.

In many ways, how community newspapers use technology is changing how their readers perceive them. They are no longer limited to their cities or provinces, no longer parochial in an interconnected world, no longer poor country cousins to the Manila-based publications. With technology, they can do almost everything that the national newspapers are able to do.