The National Paper of Mindanao Marks 17

Not too long ago, former Presidential Assistant for Mindanao Jesus Dureza was the guest of honor at a news forum which was among the festivities marking the Miss Mindanao beauty pageant in Davao City hosted by Mindanao Gold Star Daily (GSD).

Dureza remarked that Gold Star Daily was very much like Philippine Airlines (PAL) when the latter was still serving unprofitable "missionary routes" in Mindanao, or destinations with low passenger and cargo traffic.

"Anywhere I went, it seemed I was seeing Gold Star Daily," Dureza said. "I was wondering why GSD was being read in places which had little or no markets for ads and newspaper sales and subscriptions."

In his rejoinder, GSD President and Chief Executive Officer said Dureza couldn't even imagine how similar the two pioneering enterprises were.

"If PAL was jokingly called Plane Always Late for its notoriety in not keeping its scheduled arrivals and departures, newspaper dealers and subscribers in Mindanao also had a moniker for GSD : Gold Star Delayed!

"In the early days when we were expanding to other areas, our offset presses could no longer cope with the increasing number of copies needed, so oftentimes GSD arrived in some places late in the afternoon or sometimes even early next morning already," Chu laughingly recalls.

On July 1st this year, what Chu touted as "the most widely circulated newspaper in Mindanao" and now being increasingly referred to as the "National Paper of Mindanao" will mark its 17 th anniversary.

"I even don't have a copy anymore of our first issue published on July 1, 1989," Chu said. "Frankly, I wasn't expecting our newspaper to last 17 years."

Originally started as a printing business called Oro Master Printing Press at a small building along Pabayo-Chaves Streets, the firm only had one operator for its Solna 125 printing press and four editorial staff (Cris Diaz as editor-in-chief, Bingo Alcordo and Lito Menez as reporters and Ramon Guidaven as photographer to produce its daily edition of eight pages.

"Being neither a journalist nor a publisher, I had no experience in journalism and publishing, and made some mistakes in the early going that eventually turned to our advantage," Chu recalls.

To start with, everyone was pushing him to go daily at a time when all the newspapers were weeklies. "I was learning step-by-step as I went along, and one of my early mistakes was adopting a daily frequency for GSD," Chu admits.

At the time, the main source of revenues was government announcements and legal notices which often ran for three consecutive weeks and was only paid in full after the publication of the third and last issue. In contrast, operating expenses were being incurred daily, so GSD had its baptism of fire with a "cash flow" problem.

"So for the first six months, we operated under the milieu of daily expenses and weekly collections," Chu said. "The market for ads was immature and we could not produce the 30 stories a day we needed for a daily newspaper."

Friends and foes alike shared the same pessimism about the future of the fledgling community paper. "Nobody thought we would survive," Chu said. "Everybody was waiting for us to fail, even placing bets on when exactly we would go under."

Things got so bad that then editor-in-chief Bingo Alcordo bluntly asked Chu: Should we continue or not? Chu recalls by then he already realized Cagayan de Oro at the time could not sustain GSD editorially and financially. So he had two choices: fold-up or expand elsewhere in Mindanao.

In 1991, GSD made the big move outside its home base, expanding its business first to Iligan, Lanao del Norte thence to Malaybalay, Bukidnon and Gingoog City, Misamis Oriental. Initial success with news and ads encouraged Chu to venture further on to the Caraga Region : Butuan City, and the two Surigao and Agusan provinces.

But the expansion to far-flung areas meant GSD was arriving at these destinations increasingly later in the day. "It was mainly a production problem," Chu explained.

"As we expanded to Western and North Eastern Mindanao, we encountered problems especially with folding," he said. Although GSD by this time already had 3 offset presses, the delay in arrival as a result of production problems eventually led Chu to purchase a web-offset press, albeit second hand, but nevertheless, the first (and still the only one) in Mindanao in 1994.

The size of the press forced GSD to move out of its original home in Pabayo street to new production and editorial offices in Barangay Gusa, some 5 kms away. But the speed with which the web press churned out the paper was worth it.

"It could print 10,000 copies of an eight page issue, back-to-back and fully folded in only 2-3 hours," Chu said. "This took our three offset presses at least eight hours to produce and we had to manually fold the papers by hand afterwards."

Like PAL, GSD's Gold Star Delayed moniker eventually faded into history and for the first time ever, a daily newspaper based in Mindanao was reaching all its 23 cities and 24 provinces.

"No other newspaper could do it, and no other newspaper still can, to this day," Chu says matter-of-factly. A rival newspaper has issues in some key cities of the island but besides the name, it has localized content, in contrast to GSD which has a uniform content island-wide.

Associate Edior Nelson Constantino recalls the following incident during a publisher's forum held in Zamboanga City about five years ago:

"An editor questioned claims by various local newspapers that they were circulating Mindanao-wide and yet could hardly been seen in the neighboring province. A heated debate ensued until a publishers from Zamboanga del Sur stood up and proclaimed : 'Only one man did that! That Chinese man from Cagayan de Oro." He was, of course, referring to Mr. Chu, as the only publisher who could truly claim that his newspaper saturates the entire island."

At its height from 1995-1998, GSD went from strength to strength, expanding to "missionary areas" akin to the missionary routes pioneered by PAL. It had 40 regular employees and as many as 500 bureau staff employed in circulation, advertising and editorial works. When the Asian Financial Crisis hit in 1997, its resiliency still enabled GSD to continue its expanded scope of circulation Mindanao-wide until 2000, when rival local newspapers and an outdated presidential decree affected revenues, forcing Chu to pull out from some areas.

Besides requiring a one-year residency period for all newspapers, Presidential Decree No. 1079 signed by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos also stipulated that all government ads and notices be published in local newspapers based in the immediate vicinity of the particular agency or LGU.

"Some areas such as Butuan, Iligan and Malaybalay banned us from publishing government ads and notices," Chu recalls. "We have lobbied with Sen. Nene Pimentel to help us have it repealed since it is anti-poor as local papers are wont to overprice poor litigants, but so far, it's still there."

"A change in strategy to focus in ads from Metro Manila helped us survive," Chu admits. "I also realized we could not compete with national broadsheets if we depended on newsstand sales, so I had the circulation staff of our bureaus focus on subscriptions and direct sales."

"Previously, half of our ad revenues were being generated by our bureaus all over Mindanao, 30 percent in Cagayan de Oro and the rest from Metro Manila," Chu disclosed.

But with the predominantly agricultural Mindanao economy alternately buffeted by El Niño and La Niña, ad revenues from bureaus dropped until it now comprises only 20 percent of the total pie, with its former share now accounted for by ad agencies based in Manila.

"We captured the Manila market by offering agencies the one thing our competitors could not: local content in a Mindanao-wide newspaper with unmatched circulation and readership," Chu stressed.

Although Manila-based ad agencies usually allocate only 10-15 percent of their total ad spend for print to the regions, GSD managed to corner almost half of that pie which smoothed it over during the doldrums brought by the combined effects of the Asian Financial Crisis, bad weather and political crisis.

"We also noted that to save on production costs, ad agencies produced ad materials only in broadsheet format," Chu observed. "So that would be our biggest challenge, to eventually go broadsheet to maximize our revenues from the Manila-based agencies."

The Big Plan would initially cost GSD some P5-million for the basic model of a full-color web offset machine which could be expanded later on a modular basis. On top of that, would be the need to expand the editorial and marketing staff to fill in the bigger space with news and ads.

GSD Editor-in-Chief Herbie Gomez said providing the editorial and ad content for a 12-page community broadsheet is very "doable" by doubling the paper's present editorial and reportorial work force.

"We have experienced and talented editors and reporters from Cagayan de Oro and our bureaus," Gomez observed. "Question is, will we be able to afford them, or will they be willing to work for a community paper with a coverage as wide as Mindanao?"

He also noted that while communications with GSD's bureaus all over Mindanao have vastly improved with fax machines, email and SMS (texting) services now widely accessible, the need to further train bureau editorial staff in English and news writing remains.

News operations would most probably also have to be upgraded with desking and breaking news capabilities which are not possible with the present staff.

As the "National Paper of Mindanao" moves towards the second decade of the young millennium, the days of Gold Star Delayed would slowly fade into fond memories of the "baddd ole days" by the old timers as they drink their beer after a long day's grind in places where even the Plane Always Late had long departed into oblivion.

INDNJC -