A SINGAPOREAN editor I talked with during a journalism forum in Jakarta sometime ago put it bluntly: “I was in Cebu last year during Halloween and watched TV coverage there: a lot of the news was about people cleaning and repainting grave sites, about prices of flowers, about children collecting half-burned candles...I was amazed by the amount of time spent on a non-story like the Halloween. And I learned you do that stuff every year.”
I said yes but couldn’t say more as the session resumed and I didn’t have the chance to pick up the issue again.
Indeed, yes, Cebu media have doggedly covered the Halloween since ages ago but I would’ve also tossed back to the foreign journalist: “How about you, don’t you also do the same to seasonal news? Doesn’t that happen everywhere?”
Seasonal news can be both benefit and curse. “Kalag-kalag” or the Holy Week, for example, provides news peg for stories that otherwise wouldn’t be worthy of print space or broadcast time. It becomes a bane when it produces by rote dull and flat non-stories: more of the same thing produced last year and years before that.
Not like theirs
First, this must be said for outsiders who find puzzling local media’s faithful attention on Halloween and Lent:
-- Our “kalag-kalag” is not like the Halloween in western countries, which is mostly party fun for children. All Saints Day and All Souls Day are religious rituals that encourage respect of the living for the dead. And Lent is a holy season that our mostly-Catholic populace observe.
-- Ignoring or under-rating Halloween or lent would “devalue” our culture and would “disconnect” media from its community.
That kind of seasonal news is big to local audiences; thus the large amount of media attention it gets.
Bottom of barrel?
Yet that doesn’t justify the routinely insipid non-news that come out from the media mill year after year.
News editors must have been more resourceful before but as they went through the same drill again and again, they must now be scouring bottom of the barrel.
How can they report hard news from the cemetery, one jaded reporter quipped, if it is peaceful and orderly, if the noise of the living don’t disrupt the quiet of the dead?
Reporters and editors may have to look harder for stories other than, during Halloween, the expected leap of prices of candles and flowers, smuggling of liquor into the cemetery, and priests making brisk business on grave-side rituals. And, during lent, stories on revisiting stations-of-the-cross sites and pilgrimage destinations, on whether that Bargayo would have himself nailed to the cross again, seven-last-words speakers and topics, or preparations for “sugat.”
Repetition
There must be other things than what were serially reported in previous seasons.
Repetition or recycling is unavoidable, especially on data the audience needs: changes in program schedules, closure of some roads to motor vehicle, rerouting of traffic, new rules in cemetery or church access, and the like. Lately, media have published useful information for the public, from preparing for typhoons and earthquakes to surviving the crowd in Sinulog and Sto. Niño procession.
Non-news maybe but beneficial to the media public.
Fresh ideas
Yet look at some fresh ideas that one would see occasionally in print and broadcast, showing that creative juices still flow:
-- A story about a “haunted” road near a “balete” tree where vehicular accidents had frequently occurred; blending of facts and popular belief made an interesting tale;
-- A TV news segment on the closure of a pilgrimage site, why people had stopped going there, religion and business clashed, hurting both;
-- How “siete palabras” speakers were picked and the story why versions other than the archdiocese presentation were banned;
-- Building of a pilgrimage site for a retired businesswoman who filled a shrine with relics and artifacts she collected from world-wide trips.
Repackaging
Seasonal news necessarily include stale material. Repackaging it is supposed to do the trick. Journalists need to keep looking for the new, the interesting, and the meaningful for its audiences.
Long-held editorial practices may have to be reviewed: does broadcast news really have to devote two full news days on cemetery activities?
Nothing newsworthy could possibly happen in a cemetery unless some lunatic would explode a grenade there -- as what happened in Talisay City in 1988, which killed seven people and wounded 40 others, quickly converting seasonal non-news to hard news.
[publicandstandards@sunstar.com.ph or paseares@gmail.com]