ljm
Manila, 13 September—It used to be that Septembers were a big deal in the Old Newsroom because it was LJM and MRP’s birth month, and this meant lots of free food every now and then. On the day itself, there was usually a catering set-up, and there’d be dinner for everyone who worked in the newsroom that night. Once, I remember there was a live string quartet at the lobby.
Ah, the good old days.
These days, LJM’s birthday is still commemorated, but instead of live string quartets and catering, they now put flowers on her desk, because she loved flowers very much. If she could get away with the Sunday edition having flowers for frontpage main photos week after week, she would.
Two years ago, I wrote about LJM in the old blog. This was a couple of days after she passed. When she died, I was celebrating Christmas Eve with family. I remember going to the office for Christmas Day duty and hugging everyone.
I remember asking our opinion editor Ma’am Chats, who wrote LJM’s front-page obituary: “What do we do?” Her tear-streaked reply: “We pull ourselves together.”
And so we pull.
It’s been years since then, and both Ma’am Chats and I have left the newsroom (she has since retired). The newsroom is no longer what it was, not just because LJM is gone, but also because they have been trying so hard to change everything about it: A branding thing, a design thing, a process thing, here and there. It took so much out of all of us that we lost track of what it truly meant to put out the paper we called the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
In another LJM birthday commemoration post, editor Chelo Formoso shared this snippet that LJM said, which struck me as the crux of the Inquirer’s woes today:
“Whatever the platform, let’s call ourselves the Philippine Daily Inquirer —not Inquirer Group, which is not a brand. Not recognizable in an instant. The New York Times is always The New York Times across all platforms.”
Not recognizable in an instant. Hell, sometimes, I don’t recognize it at all.