When we began

It now really feels like it was a century ago. It’s certainly been more than one generation that’s passed through these pages. Those of us who were there at the start can now look back 16 years and see that enough time has passed to call it a legacy. If anything, our own lives are a testament to this in that a lot of us actually got careers now and have had lives since then that have involved marriages and separations, gains and losses, births and deaths. We’ve come a long, long way together…

Back in 1996, there was no Internet. Or, at least it was not as accessible as it is now. It wasn’t something that offices were understood or required to have. (Funny to think what people used to do when they were pretending to work or passing the time between deadlines. Did they actually just speak to each other and have conversations? The horror.) The most significant difference would be that we didn’t use email. If our deadlines were at 3pm, we would have to be done with our articles hours before then. We’d then print out three copies for the sub-editors of the section and Aling Becky, who had unenviable task of inputting our text into the main computer. If we couldn’t connect to and send through the fax machine—which was usual—then we’d have to bring our articles all the way to the Philippine STAR offices at the Port Area.

Pre-social media, feedback came in the form of letters sent to the STAR offices. The largest number I ever received was for an article I wrote panning Sir Elton John’s remaking of his own hit, “Candle in the Wind” to commemorate the untimely death of Princess Diana. If I remember correctly, I wrote that it was already sad enough for the public in general that we shouldn’t suffer any more than we had to. (I still stand by that, by the way.) There must’ve been more than hundred letters in response to the piece. To me, it was the equivalent of getting a standing ovation—even if was from mob seemingly quite keen to lynch me. No amount of comments on Twitter or Facebook could match. For one thing, the letters sent were composed with thought and a lot of them took several pages. The ones that were handwritten were so inked hard that several of them had punctures on the paper. Most of them were also signed with letter senders’ complete names. I’ve kept a few of them. The more nasty ones, of course.

But with that said, there’s still a lot that’s not changed really. The same values that made Young STAR a success back then and what’s kept it relevant throughout the years remains the same. Our editor, Millet Manaquil, always told us that as much as we were kids writing for “the kids” we were also writing for our elders. That was very key advice and the main reason why YS has lasted this long. We didn’t talk down to our readers. We were also trying to get a dialogue going between ourselves and with our parents. More than just talking about our generation, we were talking for them.

As the last 16 years has proven, there was a lot to be said as much as there is still much more to be said.