Community newspapers in the country are struggling to survive amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The regional newspaper Punto Central Luzon stopped printing twice-weekly at the start of ECQ on March 16. It revived the print edition at least once weekly at the start of MGCQ in June.
“We have yet to pay our news contributors and columnists. But they continue sending materials. In a sense, they are helping sustain PNN and we promise to pay once the business side picks up,” De Fiesta said. In Bulacan province, local publishers, who also largely rely on legal notices for income, said they would ask the courts to give them more time to print their old issues due to financial constraints.
Each of these publications has suffered at least P100,000 in monthly revenue losses due to lack of local ads from government agencies and commercial establishments. “We have not retrenched people, but we also have no ads,” said Rayos, whose paper is circulated in Calabarzon region. In Negros Occidental province, a drastic drop in advertising revenue has also been experienced by newspapers due to the shutdown of many businesses and the difficulty of distributing copies.
In Eastern Visayas, the Leyte Samar Daily Express is printed only twice a week due to restrictions brought about by the pandemic. Aileen Grafil, its operations chief, said the drop in advertisements and the difficulty in getting printing supplies were disrupting its operations.Media workers in Mindanao said they had also been growing anxious as some media companies are closing down while others contemplate going online.
But he said doing so would mean they would be hiring, not firing workers. “We have to recruit more warm bodies and improve our content amplification, have livestreaming capability,” said Ajero, who also chairs the boards of Edge Davao and Zion Accuprint Publishing Inc.
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