Today, Manila Bulletin turns 124 years old.
This year also marks my 18th year as a member of this historic, venerable organization, as well as my 30th year in lifestyle journalism.
When I think about it, my life is a dream come true. I was eight years old when, for reasons I don’t recall, on a random page in my gradeschool notebook, I scribbled my name, under which I wrote “Journalism, University of the Philippines (UP)” — a prophecy come true because I did go to UP-Diliman, where I majored in Journalism.
Not that I wanted to be a journalist. By the time I was a college sophomore, I decided I wanted to do advertising. My friends were mostly Business Administration majors. When the late National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose asked me, “Why didn’t you hang out with writers your age?” I said, “Because I didn’t want to be creative, I wanted to be commercial, I wanted to be rich.”
I did start out in advertising, but after four years, fate intervened and I found myself in front of acclaimed journalist Nestor Mata, then executive editor of a glossy magazine, who told me, “I said you were overqualified because you are getting three times the salary we have to offer, but I didn’t say you were qualified for the job. To us, advertising people like you are only caption writers.”
But I did get the job. It was at the cost of two-thirds of my salary, but it was a dream come true, especially when, after four years in the magazine, I moved to a newspaper.
From the get-go, I was of the notion that my job had a quasi-public thrust and so then, as I do now, I looked at it as a vocation more than a career or a profession. I understood that my mandate as a storyteller was to partner up with others — the car companies, the airlines, the restaurants, the hotels, the movers and shakers — to make people realize what was possible, to make lives better, to make people dream, and — though I didn’t know it then — to help build this nation.
It wasn’t until 2014, when I was appointed lifestyle editor of Manila Bulletin, whose core mission is expressed in its longtime slogan “Exponent of Philippine Progress,” that I realized, after having fueled my writing ambitions with a near-obsessive fascination with American literature, British prose, French poetry, and all the international magazines, that being a Filipino distinguished me from other storytellers in the world.
From 2006 to 2014 when, concurrent to my position as Manila Bulletin lifestyle editor, I was also tasked to update the institutional literary and cultural magazine Panorama, the idea of pushing the Filipino agenda stewed in me.
From 2014 onward, the stories came as the champions of Philippine culture joined me in my quest, from fashion to festivals, from cuisine to commerce, from lore to literature. Never has the idea of being Filipino served as inextricably from everything we do as “The Big Idea,” to use advertising parlance, than it has, trendy as well as fashionable yet effectively sustained, over the last decade or so.
There’s been a sea change in the industry. Our lives have dramatically changed. We have found myriad new forms of sharing stories, such as social media, but the need for stories remains and storytelling remains a worthwhile endeavor, one to which, like I have, some of us blessed — or cursed — with the skills can devote an entire lifetime.
The job of a writer, is “perhaps the only one in the world that becomes more difficult the more you do it,” as Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez said, but it is the one I have chosen. The constant challenges notwithstanding, I never lose sight of it being a dream once upon a time.
I salute Manila Bulletin for its tireless pursuit of the truth told in the many, changing ways that resonate with generations of the Filipino public over the past 124 years and counting.
Thank you for being a dream come true for generations of writers — and readers — like me.
(AA Patawaran is the Lifestyle Editor of Manila Bulletin.)