Kris Alingod - AHN News Contributor
Manila, Philippines (AHN) - Digital journalism in a developing nation like the Philippines is straddled with problems such as poor infrastructure and a glaring income gap, but it is rapidly developing and will have to address the same issues of copyright protection and declining quality as those faced by advanced countries.
"The Philippines still has a long way to go in terms of accessing news and information through the Internet," says Edwin Espejo, a contributor for Asian Correspondents, a site that seeks to deliver news and political commentary through a "hybrid of personalized, professional content and user contributions."
"Only a small percentage of Filipino households have Internet connection," Espejo adds. "Online or digital journalism in the Philippine is still in its infancy and only a handful of news websites are existing... the value of this medium is its impact to policy and opinion makers."
There were only 5.9 million Internet users in the country in 2009, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. The number is up just slightly from 5.6 million users in the previous year.
Internet subscriptions among Filipinos numbered 3 million last year, unchanged from 2008.
The current population estimate for the nation is 99.9 million, of which 33 percent live below the poverty line.
A reality these statistics do not capture, however, is the distinctly local phenomenon of cell phone texting that has given the nation one of the highest rates of SMS use worldwide. The Philippines is also the third-biggest supplier of workers worldwide, and many of the 11 million Filipinos working overseas keep in touch with their families through the Web.
Internet usage, however, does not always involve accessing news, and even those who regularly read news seem to prefer reaching for the traditional inky newsprint rather than a mouse.
"I get my news mostly from just scanning the headlines of the local papers, and the printed version of the Asian Wall Street Journal," Josephine Wee tells All Headline News.
Wee is a business owner and prolific reader who describes herself as "not a good representative of a good percentage of the demographic faction," referring to the young Filipinos who daily throng Internet cafes, or spend time in their work stations and university libraries for games, blogging, research, downloading music or videos and interacting in social networking sites.
Wee says she gets to follow some international coverage on Yahoo news when she checks for email messages. But she prefers no medium over another, and cites lack of time as the primary reason for the way she accesses news.
"Most Filipinos who access the Internet go to Internet cafés but majority of them do not necessarily open news websites," according to Espejo. "Facebook and Twitter are increasingly becoming a popular medium to disseminate news, information and opinions, however."
The ubiquity of Internet cafes -- a number of which have the barest essentials and do without air conditioning, are located in low-income communities and give the phrase "hole in the wall" new meaning -- was reported as early as 2002 in an ITU report on the state of the Internet in the Philippines.
The study used a framework that measures the level to which non-technicians use the Web, called pervasiveness, the geographical dispersion of the Internet within a nation, and other factors.
The ITU rated the pervasiveness of the Web in the Philippines at 3, the second-highest level and translated as "common." Geographic distribution was 2.5 or "highly dispersed," with the disclaimer that the Web is not widely available in rural areas because of poor infrastructure.
The question of access involves not merely structural terms. The cost of having regular Internet access can drain an average Filipino worker's earnings.
The average Filipino family earns P14,416 ($312) a month, according to the 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, the latest data available from the National Statistics Office. The average family spends 85 percent of all its income for food, utilities, transportation and household expenditures such as rent, leaving a savings of P2,166 ($47).
A regular monthly subscription to a 1 Mbps plan from either of the country's two major providers is P1,000 ($22).
There is also a glaring income gap among urban and rural families that reflects the digital divide among developed and underdeveloped nations.
Filipino families in the National Capital Region, where the capital and main business districts are located, earn 44 percent more than the national average, and 71 percent more than families in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, where political corruption and centuries-old strife between Christians and Muslims have made it one of the nation's poorest regions despite its rich natural biodiversity and strategic location for trade with Southeast Asian neighbors.
Poor countries like the Philippines have "a long way to go," remarks Wee.
"You have to address the poverty," she explains. "In this country, though, I would not discount the ingenuity of agile companies."
The issue of a national communications backbone to improve online access is only one issue of a process that Philippine digital journalism is undergoing.
Users in countries like China, with its "Great Firewall," and Iran, where Twitter figured prominently in how anti-government riots were reported to the international community, are dealing with censorship.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is facing questions such as "free riding" by news aggregators and search engines, including Google, when they report news from print or broadcast media, and whether facts, also called hot news, should be copyrighted.
Worldwide, however, traditional newspapers have been forced to digitize, to cut down on staff and make other drastic changes to keep their readership and attract lost print advertising.
The forefront of this revolution is understandably where the Internet was invented and where David Winer, the father of blogging and one of the developers of RSS, declared 2010 as "Year Zero for journalism the way 1970 was the dawn of modern computer science."
"Like any other media, online journalism will have to undergo birthing pains – from quality to authenticity and accuracy," Espejo, former managing editor of Sunstar General Santos and Sunstar Business Weekly, told AHN. "Online news organizations will only be as good as their content and the people who write or contribute [to] them."
"The matter of how the newspapers will survive... is highly difficult, in the same manner that most industries today have to figure out daily how to innovate and be ahead and [be] relevant," Wee adds.
Filipino bloggers took significant steps this year after the nation elected a new president who, as senator, had said in an open letter to them just three years ago, "The blogosphere has become an extension of our democratic space where we express an opinion. Bloggers are a most compelling force indeed that could shape an informed vote."
Moreover, bloggers last month were accredited for the first time to cover a presidential inauguration. Whether or not a blogger will be part of the official press corps of President Noynoy Aquino remains unclear, but the developments seem promising, especially in a nation that patterns its popular culture and government after the United States.
The White House press corps has at least three accredited bloggers: the Huffington Post, Mediaite and Talking Points Memo. The White House is also one the first branches of government in the world to use Facebook and Twitter to interact with the public.
"Excluding bloggers from the press corps is one sure manifestation that online journalism is yet to make a dent on mainstream media in the Philippines," Espejo says, but he also argues, "Online journalism will eventually become 'mainstream' and news organizations will play a vital role in developing it into one."
The new Aquino administration has shown it is well aware of the gains of a flourishing online community of bloggers, journalists and participative voters.
It may work to address the underdeveloped infrastructure hampering online access among rural communities, but its current website is still "under construction" three weeks after the inauguration, an inevitable discrepancy between even the most sincere campaign promises and the realities of a developing nation ranked worldwide as the deadliest place for journalists.
In the meantime, perhaps it is the vigilance of the young, and the studious efforts of non-government organizations such as the ITU that will help Philippine online journalism develop.
"Since the population of this country is very young, [widespread access] could very well happen fast, as the young emulate well and fast, especially what is happening in the West," Wee says.
"The global deployment of broadband networks will be as powerful a transformational force for the 21st century as the progressive installation of electricity networks was in... the 20th century,” ITU secretary genera Haadoun Toure said this month in a forum to accelerate the deployment of broadband networks. "Connectivity to broadband networks will be vital to the ongoing development of every nation."
Toure believes "high-end, high-cost" broadband can help address problems in the poorest nations by helping achieve universal primary education and reduce poverty and hunger, both U.N. Millennium Development goals. He is part of a group of IT experts who will present recommendations to the United Nations in September.
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Manila, Philippines -- 
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