Going Beyond the Comfort Zone

Convergent journalism is starting to take shape in the Philippines with huge media companies like ABS-CBN, GMA-7 and the Philippine Daily Inquirer tapping various media in a bid to reach audiences and meet the unwavering demand for information. For a newspaper company like the Inquirer, venturing into television, online news, among others, has actually become a means for improving itself and its image as the country’s leading newspaper. The Inquirer is probably the newspaper in the Philippines that has gone through the most innovation. It teamed up with GMA to create the news portal, www.inq7.net. Though the move of creating an online news website is already a worldwide trend, I also considered in, some way, as a defense mechanism as the print journalism battles declining readership and circulation. Maximizing manpower has become critical in this case. It has become a challenge of improving skills, learning new techniques in reporting, without compromising quality, or simply put: Going beyond the comfort zone.
As far as I know, multi-media journalists in the Philippines have a number of must-haves, a PDA that is used as a cellular phone, video camera and a digital camera and a computer notebook or lap-top. When there is breaking news, the cellular phone comes in handy. Television and radio reporters are actually reporting right at the thick of the action. The news story on the website would follow a few minutes later. This was the case recently when ABS-CBN and GMA covered the promulgation of the Subic Rape Case, involving four American servicemen, who were the subject of a complaint by a Filipina.