The 2008 Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism (JVOAEJ) will focus on corruption/governance, human rights and environmental issues.
This was among the changes announced in the country’s most prestigious journalism awards by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), which administers the JVOAEJ.
CMFR executive director Melinda de Jesus said the changes are being introduced in recognition of the urgency of encouraging journalistic excellence in addressing corruption/ governance, human rights, and environmental issues.
The country has been rocked by one corruption scandal after another, even as the human rights situation and environmental degradation have worsened.
CMFR also announced that a Board of Judges is being constituted to decide on who the 2008 JVOAEJ awardees will be. The selection process goes through several stages. CMFR conducted the first late last year, the independent scan of the major news publications to collect articles on the basis of minimum criteria, length and time of publication.
Articles submitted earlier were screened by a committee of journalists and academics last April 3 and 4. CMFR has also received for screening nominations by editors and reporters of in-depth reports published in 2007. Articles submitted to the Board of Judges do not have to be nominated by the news organization.
The articles that pass the screening stage used to be classified into investigative and explanatory articles and were then forwarded to Boards of Judges in the politics and governance, business and economics, and environment and social issues categories. A “superboard” then decided on a list of ten finalists at most, from which three awardees each from the investigative and explanatory categories were drawn.
CMFR said that for the judging this year, a superboard will no longer be constituted, and no distinction will be made between articles published in weeklies and dailies. A Board of Judges, which includes members of the Screening Committee to assure continuity in the process, will instead decide on one awardee for each of the three categories mentioned above. The winning articles can be either investigative or explanatory reports, and will receive the usual cash prize of P70,000 each. Other meritorious investigative/explanatory articles will also be recognized and accordingly awarded.
The recipients of the Marshall McLuhan Prize and Australian Ambassador’s Award will be chosen from among the awardees by the Canadian and Australian embassies in consultation with CMFR. The awardees will be presented in a ceremony preceded by the JVOAEJ journalism seminar, which this year will be on June 26.
A group of veteran journalists has established Vera Files, which they said will be doing in-depth and investigative stories on Philippine issues. Vera is Latin for “true.”
According to Ellen Tordesillas, one of its trustees, Vera Files will provide relevant information about current Philippine issues thru stories with background, context, and perspective. It aims to help make the public understand these issues so it can make informed decisions.
The new group’s first story, on the Spratlys issue, was published on March 10 in several Manila newspapers, followed by a series on the biofuels law on April 7 and 8.
In addition to Malaya columnist and Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism (JVOAEJ) first-prize winner Tordesillas, the trustees and main writers of Vera Files are Yvonne Chua and Luz Rimban, who are both JVOAEJ Hall of Famers; Chit Estella, former PJR Reports editor; Booma Cruz, formerly of Pinoy Times; and Jennifer Santiago of BusinessMirror.
Chua and Estella are both faculty members of the Department of Journalism of the University of the Philippines, while Rimban teaches at the Ateneo de Manila Department of Communication.
Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, former editor of the PJR Reports, has officially resigned as the press ombudsman/readers’ advocate of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Tirol, who held the position for three years, was the fourth ombudsman of the newspaper. The Inquirer’s previous readers’ advocates were Domingo Quimlat, Alice Colet Villadolid, and Raul Palabrica.
The press ombudsman—also referred to as news ombudsman, public editor, readers’ representative, or readers’ advocate—acts as a liaison between readers and the newsroom, trying to make both parties understand each other. The ombudsman has a mandate to represent the readers in the newsroom, addressing their concerns about the newspaper’s work. S/he thereby assures that fairness, accuracy, and balance are being met in news reports.
The role is usually given to long-term practitioners. It is commonly assigned to a newspaper insider, sometimes assumed by the publisher or editor; to an outsider, to provide an extra level of independence; or to someone appointed by the government (as in the case of Sweden). Some ombudsmen work on a contractual basis while most are on the newspaper’s regular payroll.
The press ombudsman system originated in Japan in a Tokyo daily in 1922 and was later developed in the US in 1967. It was then adopted by such countries as UK, Ireland, Canada, and those in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, many years after. It was meant to provide an independent, self-regulatory mechanism to ensure transparency and accountability in news gathering and dissemination—a crucial task in establishing and sustaining newspaper credibility before the public.
Despite what a press ombudsman can do in the newsroom, the concept has not achieved universal acceptance in the media. According to the European Journalism Observatory, there are roughly 90 press ombudsmen internationally as of 2007. In the US alone, the number of press ombudsmen is declining as news organizations abolish the position for economic reasons despite several US studies suggesting that the position has a positive effect on improving newspaper credibility and over-all quality.
In the Philippines, the role has already been tried and tested by many newspapers. The Inquirer, The Philippine Star, the Manila Bulletin, The Manila Times, Malaya, and BusinessWorld and the now-defunct The Manila Chronicle and Philippine Times Journal are among the newspapers that, at least once, employed ombudsmen in their newsrooms. History has shown that as in most other countries, the press ombudsman system does not work in the Philippines either, and only the Inquirer has retained the position of ombudsman, or readers’ advocate.
According to Vergel Santos, chairman of the editorial board of BusinessWorld, the main reason why press ombudsmanship is deemed ineffective is because the role “has an inherently ethical anomaly.” He said that the nature of the job makes it unclear whose interests press ombudsmen represent. “Newspapers have profit interests. A press ombudsman represents the public interest, but is being paid by people who have private interests,” Santos argued.
Newspapers employ a press ombudsman to impress on the public that they put a premium on their readers’ concerns, but its limits are not properly defined. Santos said that some go beyond their duties and meddle in tasks that are not included in their job descriptions. This situation blurs a press ombudsman’s lines of authority, creating conflict within the ranks in the newsroom.
But for Jose Pavia, executive director of the Philippine Press Institute, the failings of press performance monitoring institutions initiated in the country by the media themselves can be attributed to the low turn-out of complaints. Some people are too focused on other engagements and tend not to complain, while others are contented with buying tabloids which feed them the news that they want and which they therefore would not criticize. He said that with the small number of complaints, newspapers would think twice before employing press ombudsmen.
The history of the Philippine media has shown that at least initially they are motivated not by the public’s right to and need for information but by private and political interests, the media being multi-million business propositions and as well as political weapons. Those who are supposed to represent public interest within the media, such as press ombudsmen, are pressured to prioritize the media’s private and political interests first. The press ombudsman system thus tends to be a vulnerable regulatory mechanism most especially in the commercially- and politically-driven media in the Philippines.
A book that recounts a timeless existence of the convergence between the forces of the Philippine media and politics, The Power and the Glory: the Story of the Manila Chronicle 1945-1998, was recently released.
Authored by historian Raul Rodrigo, The Power and the Glory deals with the entire saga of The Manila Chronicle from the time it was put up by a group of journalists led by ex-Tribune staff Roberto Villanueva in 1945 until its tragic downfall in 1998.
The Chronicle, acclaimed as one of the finest newspapers ever to be printed in the country, served as “both recorder and actor in some of the most significant moments in Philippine history.” It has produced four Filipino winners of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, namely: Zac Sarian, Raul Locsin, Sheila Coronel, and Eggie Apostol. The Lopez family led the newspaper from 1947 to 1993.
The Eugenio Lopez Foundation published the book.
Dana Priest and Anne Hull of The Washington Post took home the 2008 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their series of reports on the deep and widespread problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Priest and Hull’s story, “The Other Walter Reed”, exposed the poor condition and bad management at the hospital. Their investigation led in the dismissal of leading Army officials and the improvement of the system for treating military outpatients. The Washington Post started publishing the reports in Feb. 2007.
The Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting honors journalists whose investigative reporting “informed the public about major problems or corruption in society and yielded concrete results.” The award is presented annually by the Annen-berg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. n |
