“Ma, kunin niyo ako rito.”
A 14-year-old boy called out to his mother from a van packed with frightened children. Hours earlier, it had been an ordinary night in Manila in 2019. He was playing video games with a friend at a computer shop when a dozen armed police officers raided the place and took him away for violating curfew. Even after coming home, he barely ate, stayed in bed, and refused to return to school. The air hung heavy with fear.
This was one of the few overtly political stories I wrote during my time at The LaSallian. My years as a features writer were otherwise spent making the seemingly mundane interesting. Think the art of parol-making, the trials of blind massage therapists, the origin story of Pinto Art Museum. Stories about lives and places people might otherwise pass by.
“The dark night” was different. I wrote it when Isko Moreno was being hailed as a fresh face in politics, a potential antithesis to the trapos. His promise was a new Manila, cleaner, safer, more orderly.
Yet there were already dark stirrings. The clearing operations. The sidewalk vendors forced aside for someone else’s vision of a better Manila. And now, a curfew that saw hundreds of minors rounded up for petty violations.
It was my first real brush with how a pretty political promise could look so different on the ground. And this was happening while the drug war was still raging. Elsewhere in the city, people accused of being drug pushers were being shot dead, left bleeding on the pavement, their deaths explained away with a word: nanlaban.
A few years later, I started my career as a Rappler journalist with little preparation beyond my campus experience. My degree, after all, was in finance. Sure, I could explain discounted cash flows and zero-coupon bonds, but how would that help me tell stories that mattered to the everyman?
Yet what a time to start. It was the beginning of a new Marcos era. You couldn’t ask for a more literal repeat of the past, with Junior reviving Senior’s programs and even hymns. My first assignment concerned the recent elections, a press conference with Comelec commissioner George Garcia. I knew little about politics, and this was before generative AI could give you a half-passing answer to almost anything. I stumbled by.
Those early days were shrouded in uncertainty, as the newsroom wondered how a Marcos, new and yet oh so familiar, would steer the Philippines. Would we face another dictatorship? It turned out, not exactly. But corruption never stopped, and our old problems never went away. The slow descent continued.
Now, four years into covering the Philippine economy under Marcos, I’ve learned that understanding the biggest stories of our time is only half the job. The harder half is getting people to care.
Again and again, I leaned on lessons from campus features writing. What sets you apart is your storytelling. For instance, everyone can cite the same numbers about the biggest company to go public in Philippine history. But did you know rush for GCash’s IPO was so overwhelming that it sent trading platforms tumbling? We can go a layer deeper: Was it a good deal for ordinary investors, or just a chance for early institutional investors to cash out? And when banks cut transfer fees but GCash held firm, was it protecting profits ahead of its IPO at our expense? Storytelling makes those questions understandable and worth asking.
The challenges are immense. Mind you, we’re an extremely light team at Rappler, nine reporters covering practically everything in the Philippines, from defense and politics to business. Business alone spans agriculture, energy, trade, finance, macroeconomics, transportation, telecommunications, and so on. We have one business reporter – me.
All of this came to a head these past few months during Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial. Rappler has been stretched thin covering marathon hearings. I was assigned to arguably the bombshell allegations, the questions surrounding the Vice President’s unexplained wealth.
One day, I rushed from covering inflation in the morning to sitting on Rappler’s live panel, then writing stories that exposed a bank’s so-called system glitch in its reporting of transactions involving the Vice President’s husband. That earned me more than a few angry calls from a certain bank.
All in a day’s work.
What is my point in all this? Don’t let anyone silence you. When history starts repeating itself, as we can already see traces of today, find strength in those who stood up against the injustices of their time – the likes of Ninoy, Edjop, and Tatang Valentin – who dared to challenge the elder Marcos at mortal peril.
Editor’s Note: This is an unedited submission from a former staffer of The LaSallian, tracing his journey from campus journalism to professional reporting amid shifting political administrations. Through his experiences covering stories from the former President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s presidency, he underscores the importance of bringing public attention to issues that matter.
Lance Spencer Yu is a multimedia reporter covering the private sector, utilities, finance, macroeconomics, transportation, and tourism. He started covering business for Rappler in 2022. He later worked as a private capital analyst at MSCI, and as an investment and strategy analyst at Dedale Intelligence, working on live deals alongside sovereign wealth funds, private equity funds, family offices, and institutional investors. Lance was also a feature writer for The LaSallian, the official student publication of De La Salle University-Manila where he earned a degree in Management of Financial Institutions, graduating magna cum laude. Reach him at [email protected].