How do you celebrate 24 years in the newspaper business? How do you celebrate a newspaper business when everything around has gone digital? Be valiant and vigilant, the Philippine Daily Inquirer responds.
Add to that, the importance of learning from precedents and predecessors.
Crediting the PDI’s 24th year with “sighting of a silver lining,” the mother and daughter tandem of Marixi R. Prieto, Chair of the Board, and Alexandra Prieto-Romualdez, President/CEO take the nation’s daily to [dare the readers say] higher ground.
The senior Prieto stresses the PDI’s “strong commitment to editorial excellence and passion to inspire action.”
In the wake of election year that is 2010, Prieto identifies individual endeavor at the core of the paper’s advancement. “… we have finally acknowledged that we can only depend on ourselves for change, and that there is a hero in each of us,” she states in today’s issue.
“Next year will be a test of what we can do as a nation. The Inquirer will be steadfast in its role as watchdog…to help make informed choices,” the PDI Chair continued.
The first, and still only, Filipino on the board of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), Prieto-Romualdez writes fresh from the recent WAN congress in India. Echoing the sentiments of newspaper and magazine publishers the world-over, Prieto-Romualdez does not eschew the challenges of the business.
Like all its local and global counterparts, PDI is progressing into the world of new media. With it, the national daily carries the predicament of monetizing its prize value: information, the source of wealth of search engines.
Prieto-Romualdez states, “Newspapers must protect their place in the sun, and protect what is rightfully its own.
It is one thing to naturally protect the bottomline. To maximize the value of content, is another. Quoting from WAN CEO Timothy Balding, she writes, “ Unless we protect and commercially exploit our high value content, the journalistic standards so important to our readers and to society will no longer be financially viable.”
Celebrating 24 years, the Philippine Daily Inquirer counts its blessings, and views its advantages. “With new media platforms [in the country] just taking off, we can learn valuable lessons from the hurdles papers in North America have had to face, and lay a better foundation in our approach and attitude to these platforms” states their positive President/CEO.
