Other than my ID number (ID 108 here!), there is another number that I use as a marker of my time at DLSU, and that is that I was EIC on The LaSallian’s 50th year, so when I received an invitation to write a column from The LaSallian’s 66th Editorial Board, it hit me like a ton of bricks that 16 years have passed since I was editor!
I can write a whole litany of things that have changed in 16 years, but I’d go over my word count just enumerating the many changes that the soul of our country has undergone in three administrations, the generational changes as millennials like myself started taking management roles in the workplace and as Gen Z started to enter the workforce, the rise and fall of social media from what started out as a way to connect with other people to something that influenced elections, the pandemic that felt like a time warp, and the one thing on everyone’s mind now even if we don’t all fully understand it: AI.
When I was in college, my classmates and I hated it when our professors made us watch or read something and asked us to write the perennial reflection paper afterwards, but looking back, this just makes me wish for a more innocent time. We didn’t have AI as a crutch. What seemed like a futile exercise for us as students is a relic from a time when we wrote what we thought of a certain movie or reading. Did we sometimes just write what our professors wanted to hear? Were we repetitive? Did we go around in circles just to reach the required word count? Sure, but it came from us.
When I was editor, my colleagues and I had to spend many hours manually proofreading articles, transcribing recorded interviews, preparing the newspaper/magazine layout on InDesign, creating graphics on Photoshop, editing photos on Lightroom, and just staring at the cursor on Word desperate for the words to flow. It feels absurd writing this down because back then, this was simply the work that it took to produce a monthly issue of The Lasallian, but now, campus journalists don’t need to manually transcribe hours of interviews anymore. They can at least use AI to proofread.
I am not a purist in the sense that I have begun to use AI in my own work to check for typos and other spelling errors. This is water under the bridge now, but I remember a disgruntled member of a certain political party at DLSU who made a comment that he doesn’t trust The LaSallian because we failed to capitalize I in Internet in one of our articles. Sure, try manually proofreading at least 10,000 words every month. Don’t get me started on how there is no universal rule for either an upper or lower case I/i for this word across different style guides.
We ruffled feathers when I was EIC because we were so fearless and young. We were imperfect and there were mistakes much more substantial than a typo, which I made as an editor, that haunt me to this day. I take the blame for this because the buck stopped with me, but there were some things that we published that didn’t always have at least two sources and yet we took the risk because we believed it was at least a story worth telling. Did it pay off? Rarely. Did we pay for the consequences? Yes. Was it worth it to try even if we failed publicly? Certainly.
Did other students care about what we wrote? I hope some of them did but most of them very likely didn’t. In one of my laboratory classes, we needed newspapers to clean up the mess from dissecting a pig’s eye (I mean this literally; my undergraduate degree was pre-med.). Some of my classmates didn’t bring newspapers from home so they got copies of The LaSallian from one of our circulation bins instead. I think it says a lot that I remember this incident 16 years later.
I don’t mean to use this guest column to gripe about how students don’t care for campus journalism. The thing is, whether with AI or not, the universal tensions of pursuing the truth and getting people to care endure. The state of campus journalism just mirrors the state of journalism in the country and the world. How do you get people to care even as countless other things are competing for their attention constantly? How do you even get people to still read? These are hard questions newsrooms all over the globe are facing even as publications have folded in the last decade, and some of them forced to switch to online versions riddled with ads.
But is it still worth it to try? To tell an important story. To stand up for something. To speak truth to power. Certainly.
Editor’s Note: This is an unedited submission from a former editor of The LaSallian, reflecting on the changes in journalism over the past 16 years and the enduring questions of truth, readership, and the role of campus publications. It also underscores the value of pursuing stories and speaking truth to power despite the challenges that come with the work.
Angel Bombarda was awarded as one of the Ten Outstanding Students of the Philippines in 2012. She has worked for non-profits and the government in the Philippines, and for international organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Bank. She has studied and worked in Singapore, Hungary (where she finished her MPA), Austria, and the US.