How to save what we love
May we meet again, Junior Inquirer
Junior Inquirer, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s youth-driven magazine, has been officially discontinued, at least on print. There is something chilling about seeing its last printed issue come out on the 32nd anniversary of the 1986 People Power Revolution. Or maybe that’s just me and my obsession about significant dates.
It’s hard not to entwine the history of the Inquirer and the post-People Power Revolution PH — if anything, they’re inevitably tangled, considering how the Inquirer was born in the twilight years of the Marcos regime, on Dec. 9, 1985.
The rest, as they say, is history — Junior Inquirer was launched ten years later, in October 1995. It has gone on to win awards from various award-giving bodies, primarily for giving children their own space. In fact, it was winning so consistently for this advocacy that the Unicef and the Philippine Press Institute had to induct JI to the Hall of Fame after roughly a decade.
On its 20th year, Junior Inquirer won the Silver Award for Enduring Excellence from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-Ifra) in India, which hailed JI’s Snoops program “for being aspiring young Filipino journalists’ first experience with journalism.”
JI’s Snoops were the newspaper’s youngest correspondents. Aged 7 to 12, these kids were trained to become the JI’s life-blood — its journalists.
And though not all Snoops — 134, per JI’s last issue — eventually became journalists, I know at least one who did: My own best friend, Inquirer reporter Julie Aurelio, who now covers the national beat, was a JI Snoop herself. She and I joined the Inquirer right after graduation in 2005, and to this day, she is living out her calling by bearing witness for the Filipino people, one story at a time. In her tribute for JI on Facebook, she said: “It was because of you (JI) that I was able to dream of being an Inquirer reporter, and eventually seize that dream myself.”
I’ve seen a few tributes here and there about JI on my feed. One such tribute was from former JI Snoop, Stan Sy: “And to think it all started with that curious 9-year-old’s desire to see his name on a printed newspaper… [I]t all began with Jr. Inquirer, and I’d like to think that without it, I wouldn’t have gained that confidence to know that I could write, and that I could do it well enough for others to believe in me.”
I feel the strongest for the team that ran JI — current editor Ruth Navarra-Mayo and supreme Snoop handler Din Villafuerte. Ruth and I worked closely together in helping out in the Inquirer Read-Along program, another Inquirer initiative for the youth. Because the Read-Along and JI were both for kids of the same age range, JI was an integral portion of the Read-Along. Together, we got to do many fun things, among them freeze in Warsaw together (haha).
In one of our last projects together before I resigned from the Inquirer, we ran a summer camp where we taught kids the basics of news and feature writing, layout and design, and photojournalism. The Junior Inquirer Summer Camp was a three-day workshop that ran in two batches. Its goal: To plant the seed of good journalism early. I remember the difficulty of putting this together right smack in the middle of the May 2016 elections — looking back, what a time to emphasize the importance of news literacy and critical thinking, no?
While I mourn for JI’s could-have-beens, I feel a glimmer of hope still. After all, along with the announcement that this was their last print issue, JI also announced that they are moving JI online — perhaps to meet their audience best, and without the cost of printing on paper, too.
I feel sad that it does seem like the advocacy of training youth journalists is being abandoned at such a crucial time — when the influx of deliberately falsified information being passed off as true and fact is at an all-time high, and critical thinking and expression are more important than ever.
Still, I hope this is not the case. I hope that JI is merely shifting its goal from training print journalists to training multimedia journalists.
When I first read Ruth’s Facebook post announcing JI’s final issue this morning, I had one question: How do we save the things we love? These past few months, it feels more and more like we are losing a little of everything, day by day.
How do we hold on? How do we fight? On good days, I tell myself to believe that something good is always coming. On bad days, I settle with an answerless What’s the point?
Standing here three decades after Edsa, I wonder though: Is today a good day or a bad day?
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