“Advertisers keep on coming because of our credibility”
ONLY 60 hours prior to posting, Manila Standard Publisher Rolando Estabillo perked up the staff in the run up to their 38th anniversary since hitting the news stands in Metro Manila’s financial capital, with words that fitly boosted their morale.
“We are now 38; we’re not young, we’re not old yet. We are millennials.We may not be at the apex in this competitive industry, but we are going up there; let’s be proud of Manila Standard,” the seasoned journalist, who cut his teeth initially as a correspondent of the Central News Agency told the staff, many of them truthfully unsung heroes of the newsroom.
The newspaper has gone through various stages of upgrade in the years since its birth and has now, thanks to the staff who have kept the faith and continued to hold on to their work ethic and loyalty – few of them already with the newspaper as from Day One – touched the competitive digital legend.
The English language newspaper has morphed a few times from an upscale tabloid to a Tall Boy to a full broadsheet and is properly competitively on a roll in its fourth decade – never mind the global health emergency which hobbled its operations somehow.
One detached analyst has summed things up, “With its coverage of the various domestic runs and overseas, Manila Standard slowly but steadily gained credibility as a distinct gatekeeper of news and information – both in its hard and soft sections.”
The newspaper, disclosed to the reading public on Philippine newsstands in 1987, rolled its presses to a fourth decade on Feb. 11, 2017, its news executives, reporters, the newsroom’s unsung heroes, the administrative, advertising, circulation and printing staff at the ready for the new challenge launched four years earlier.
On Jan. 1, 1983, newspapers faced the summons of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other.
A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol.
That challenge has not been lost on the staff of the newspaper while getting themselves up to the minute on the digital age, sometimes referred to as the information age.
This is generally considered to be that time in the 21st century, starting with the widespread use of the Internet, when we shifted from traditional industry to an economy based on information and communication technologies.
With the new roll, the newspaper is complemented by its digital service and its social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and X, the original Twitter which was rebranded in April 2023.
The founders of the Manila Standard, created the publication, persuaded there was room for a newspaper “that seeks to present facts…to serve as an intellectual forum for ideas, whether clashing or complimentary, to test the limits of investigative reporting.”
Its maiden editorial was precise in the newspaper’s mission: “To stand firm in the face of sly machinations of power brokers; to offer nuggets from the arts, which are necessary if we are to live as sensitive human beings; to tell the stories of the little day-to-day heroisms that, minus the benefits of publicity mills, go sadly unnoticed and unmarked.”
Readers had a first glimpse of the tall-man size newspaper—loosely, if immodestly, translated as “great in vertical dimension and high in stature”– nine days after a newly ratified Constitution was promulgated.
More than defining the news it underscored the future of competition in the discerning, if tasteful, print industry.
It competed with other firmly installed publications while it wrestled for a share of the advertising pie and attention from the opinionated and well-informed public.
As the Manila Standard and other newspapers raced frenetically for honest, balanced and accurate reportage, they individually raised the challenge whether they could continue to be relevant in the years ahead.
As the publisher said, “We’re going strong (and) I am very proud in the way we have evolved as a newspaper, and I am referring to all, including the printing, the layout, the circulation, the advertising, the business, the reporters and, of course , the editors..
“Advertisers keep on coming because of our credibility.”
As members of the bar say, submitted your honor.