By Joyce Panares
Seminar Director, PPI
“By joining this sharing platform, you have opened a window for yourself to better prospects not only for today but over the long haul.”
Local news has been likened to a glue that holds communities together. But in a fast-changing media landscape, community newspapers are barely getting by, struggling to make that crucial pivot to thrive in a digital world.
Community newspapers in the Philippines all felt the pinch during the COVID-19 pandemic, with lockdowns and mobility restrictions hastening the shift to digital news platforms for many legacy media.
For the Philippine Press Institute, the national association of newspapers with over 70 community and national dailies as members, one viable solution is to band together under one online platform that will collate and curate local news from across the country.
The idea, first brought up by PPI chairman Rolando Estabillo in 2019—several months before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out—has now become a full-fledged news aggregator in the form of the PPI News Commons that not only supports good community journalism but is also very much commercially viable.
The numbers do not lie. The pioneering news platform is the widest-reaching news aggregator in the country – from dailies and weeklies in the northernmost part of Luzon to the southernmost part of Mindanao.
With about 70 member-community newspapers on board, the PPI News Commons has a total annual collective reach of 45 million in terms of website visits and 24 million in terms of Facebook followers.
“Long before the COVID-19 rampage around the globe, newspapers have already been reeling from the deep slump in subscriptions and advertising, triggered mainly by online platforms creeping into the flow of news and information. As if it was not enough to trouble, the pandemic hit home hard. As a result, the industry’s landscape is strewn with layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, and redundancies, if not outright business closure,” Mr. Estabillo said in a speech before representatives of PPI member-newspapers ahead of the launching of the PPI News Commons today (Monday, Oct. 24, 2022).
“This is the reality on the ground that we are dealing with, to which the PPI News Commons may provide some solutions. This news-sharing platform online strings together PPI members scattered all over the country into one cohesive group,” he said.
Mr. Estabillo noted that given their instant wider market base, community papers in the PPI News Commons loop now have greater leverage to access advertisements.
“The PPI NewsCommons aims to harness the individual potential of our members into one dynamic platform without the burden of a big start-up cost. A typical community paper, which is perennially weighed down by limited resources, will be hard put to put up the needed resources to expand operations on its own. But by joining this sharing platform, you have opened a window for yourself to better prospects not only for today but over the long-haul,” he added.