Limpag: A century

DAGHANA diay gikan Freeman oi” was my reaction when I saw photos of The Freeman’s 100th anniversary, seeing photos of colleagues and former colleagues whom I never knew had their start in Cebu’s oldest daily.

I, too, started at the Freeman over 22 years ago and like I told a student who asked me how I got into media during last summer’s seminar, I blame the enrollment system of the University of San Carlos College of Engineering. The chaotic enrollment process resulted in me having so much free time that a month into the semester, I found myself in the Freeman to visit my brother, who was already a regular staff writer by then. When sports editor Nimrod Quiñones heard that I had experience as a sportswriter, he asked me to re-write a press release. He must have liked what I wrote because he asked me to go back the next day. And here I am, 22 years later, still writing. (Up to this day, sometimes I wondered that if I got a career because of USC’s enrollment process, are there any guys and gals in their early 20s now who owe their life to the same process?)

At 18 and juggling time between being a sports correspondent and an engineering student, it was challenging but a fun time for me. My classmates often wonder where I’d disappear between classes and when I showed one a byline in the Freeman...who knew a byline could earn a few dates?

My favorite Freeman story of course, one that I rarely share, involved a time when I had to pick my jaw off the floor (figuratively, of course). After submitting a story about a fun run, Sir Nimrod took one look at it, crumpled it and threw it in the trash, because I had misspelled “kilometer” as “kilometre” in the first line.

“Ay ko’g hatagi’g British English,” was what he said, a line that sticks with me, up to this day.

Lessons like that and more stuck with the ‘97 sports team—which, bragging aside, is the best sports desk Cebu has seen. I mean, a decade later, we would all lead our own sports desk, me in this paper, Manny Villaruel at the Freeman and Rick Gabuya at Cebu Daily News.

Let me clarify though that I am not old to have caught the typewriter era, though in 1997, Gabriel Malagar was still clattying-clack at his typewriter. There were no cell phones too, and the Internet in Cebu was at its infancy.

That made gathering stories really challenging, but we more than delivered. It is unthinkable now, but when I first covered Aboitiz football back then, I was there from the first game up to the last and did my own stats.

That’s how we did it.

Those were interesting times just as these are challenging times to be a media practitioner. Back then, angry readers wrote letters to the editor, but sometimes, their anger disappeared in the process of writing.

Now, readers quickly dismiss as fake news and bash any “journo” whose writing they don’t like, something that is not limited to politics. Hazards of the trade, I guess.

Happy 100, Freeman. Here’s to 100 more.

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