What makes the NPC fail

insidetheclub

What makes the NPC fail

By Teodoro Valencia

Simply stated, the emphasis on “rights” and the disregard for duties and responsibilities of the members of the National Press Club has been the main cause of the failure of the club to achieve its goals. The second big cause of failure has been the sublimation of the good of the club to political ambitions of the few. A third big reason has been the failure of club officials to realize that the primary objective of the club is to provide them a meeting place instead of a political arena.

I was among the doubters who refused to join the National Press Club after an unpleasant experience in 1953 when the annual election of officers held at the Malacanang Park turned out to be a politician’s nightmare instead of a healthy get-together of brethren in the profession. I thought this attitude would die the moment we could put up a press building. We were wrong. After a brief respite, the apathy and indifference of club members to what’s good for them, came back.

Since 1955, the National Press Club has done great things for its members. We have settled so many in permanent homes in the various government housing projects. The press has since become a cohesive force for good, speaking with one voice in times of national crisis. We have had successful attempts to gain international recognition as an active force in the press of the free world. But, sad to say, the club itself has degenerated. It is no longer the gathering place of the press. The building stands as a symbol of unity but it has failed to generate the fellowship that it was meant to promote.

The tragedy is that every member of the Press Club is aware of his Rights. He complains loudly about bad meals, about prices and about the lack of facilities in his club. Yet, nobody has ever thought of the need for supporting the club adequately. The P1-a-month fee is entirely out of the line with present needs of the club and yet every attempt to raise funds was met with strong opposition. We want a first-class club on a tenth-rate fee. We want something for nothing. Nobody ever got that. We won’t either.

The result of these is that the administrations of the club have depended entirely on the personality of whoever was President of the club. IN other words, group action never ruled the Press Club. A careless President meant a careless carefree administration. A fighting President meant a good administration. The members could not care less. They left everything to the President and felt that their only duty was to gripe.

I have almost stopped going to the National Press Club. It saddens me to have to say this but it hurt me every time I witnessed members taking the club as if it were a business establishment that they patronize and from which they could expect the best for the least amount of money. The personal hygiene of the members left much to be desired and this was obvious from the cigarette butts all over the place, the filth that could only have come from the lack of cooperation from the general patronage.

It is strange that the library, for instance, is the very same library that it was when we put up for the first time. Many good books are no longer in the shelves because some members have taken them home for their personal libraries. On had a right to expect that the library would receive personal donations from the members instead of being pirated of valuable editions. We once tried the honor system in the library but it turned out that even with the usual library registry rules, we were to lose our books.

The National Press Club is saddled with debts incurred by members who signed chits without regard to their ability to pay. The SWA (Social Welfare Administration) had nothing on the NPC. For many, the Press Club was for exploitation. Their answer to requests for payment was to stop going to the Press Club and to denounce it for arrogance or for unreasonableness on members.

The quality of the membership deserves one paragraph. Every self-proclaimed newspaperman feels that he has a “right” to membership and the officers of the club felt that some persons “have to be” taken in. It has never occurred to anyone that bad eggs should be eliminated from the membership and barred from entering the club in order to make the club a pleasant place for the rest of the newspapermen. We have had so many sad experiences with drunks and deadbeats that one would think we have learned a lesson but the truth is that we have not.

It has come to a point where members of the club don’t dare take their friends to the club because of the possibility that they would be accosted for a “touch” or perhaps engaged in a debate on subjects that have little or no interest for the guest. There was a time when foreign correspondents felt it a “must” to visit the National Press Club. Now, it is safer to show them the building and then detour them to more pleasant places for taking meals or snacks.

The National press Club was never meant to be anything but a club. It is not, and should not be molded into a headquarters for labor activities or politics. People are supposed to go to the club for relaxation from their daily toils – to sit with friends and contemplate the passing events in comparative ease, devoid of the tensions of a newspaper assignment. We have never learned to relax in the club. We have always tried to make it a battleground for ideas instead of tired heads and aching muscles.

There are many good newspapermen with executive abilities who could make the club work but they shy away from the National Press Club because they know that they would have to work alone and against odds if they want anything done at all. Unless we remove the “gimme” attitude of the members of the club and inspired in them, instead, a desire to do their part, we shall always have the building but no National Press Club.

One of the best examples of how we have ruined our own club is the way we butt into other people’s business. Almost no one is safe in giving a party in the NPC without the danger of being invaded by uninvited gusts or “kibitzers”. We have been thrown the rule book in our insane belief that since the NPC is “ours”, we can do in it what we please. In the process, we have ruined it even for our purposes.

It is incredible that the only time we get the newspapermen to go to the NPC is during election day. And most of the members go only to vote. Throughout the year, we have a handful of people who park around the club because they’ve been used to the idea or they have nowhere else to go. During special occasions, such as Gridiron Night or some special press conference, many who attend don’t want to pay their share of the expenses because they feel they have “rights”.

Unless we learned that we can’t have a real club unless we pitched in and did our share of responsibility, we shall never have one that we can be proud of. It is pointless for anyone to devote his entire energies to making a good club if that someone finds himself alone and derided for the effort.

In retrospect, I think we made a mistake in putting up this edifice called the National Press Club. We should have put up a more modest one that we could have improved as the years went by. The brutal truth is that we made the mistake of putting up a National Press Club building before we had a National Press Club in fact. We tried to build a club around a building and failed in the process. We’re still trying but the building is the handicap. Most of us feel that we “own” a share in the glory and the advantages but not in the work necessary to keep the club going.

We might save the day for the Philippine press if we elect dedicated men who will run for office in the club for what they can do for it and not for the glory that they will heap upon themselves by winning an election. The trouble today is that so many become candidates in the hope that with victory they shall be an inch taller. We need tall men who shall guide the membership, work with vigor and selflessness, not ambitious men who will inflict themselves on the club and to hell with what happens to it.

Perhaps it is time to dissociate glory from club officership. We need a permanent board of management who shall be chosen on merit and not by popularity vote. This, we must divorce from the elective board of the club who shall decide policies of the press as a professional body and help managers of the club re-make the National Press Club into a real social residence of the members. This is how they do it in the National Press Club in Washington and in other places they have successfully run press clubs.

We don’t stand to move ahead with our present ways of doing things. A politics-ridden club can only head for the scrap heap, let us forget personal glory and ambition and get together in putting up a press club that we can be proud of. We have the building. We have the land. What we don’t have is the will to make the most of our gifts of the civic community and of the government. We were given a toy but we are not playing with it. We are tearing it apart, piece by piece. There is still time to save it. If we cast aside pride, we can do it. It is later than we think.


Lifted from: The National Press Club of the Philippines 50 Golden Years

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Filipinos are top Multiply users


Please visit NPC's Multiply account: http://nationalpressclub.multiply.com/


By DAVID DIZON
abs-cbnNEWS.com

A third of the traffic going to social networking site Multiply, or approximately 300 million page views, is coming from Filipino users worldwide, top Multiply executives said Wednesday.

Multiply president and founder Peter Pezaris said Multiply gets about a billion page views a month, a third of which comes from Filipinos in different parts of the globe. This makes Filipinos the number one users of Multiply, ranking higher than users in the United States where the site is based.

Pezaris said the Filipino culture's emphasis on family and relationships is the main reason why the social networking site is so popular in the Philippines.

"The reason why we are popular here, I think, relates to that notion of friends and family, the fact that our service is much more focused on connecting you with people that you know in real life rather than introducing you to people that you don’t know. It’s a site that really plays into the cultural phenomenon that’s here in the Philippines," he told abs-cbnNEWS.com.



David Hersh, Multiply vice-president for business development, also said the integration of unlimited photosharing in Multiply is very attractive to Filipino Internet users. Most Filipino Multiply users are female, in the 18-25 age bracket, and average about 160 Multiply page views a month.

"Filipinos are just rabid consumers of content. It’s amazing. Those 160 page views aren’t just fluff page views of people bouncing from profile to profile. It’s people consuming photos, videos and blogs from the people in their world. It’s meaningful activity. It reflects the deep level of engagement that we have with our user base especially here in the Philippines," Pezaris said.

Local partner

For the Philippine market, Multiply recently partnered with ABS-CBN Interactive to tap local advertisers and launch mobile services for Filipino Multiply users. (Disclosure: Abs-cbnNEWS.com is run by ABS-CBN Interactive.)

Paolo Pineda, ABS-CBN Interactive managing director, said the company is the exclusive reseller of advertising on Multiply for the Philippines. He said ABS-CBN Interactive will also be actively campaigning to build Multiply's user base in the country.
Related links
• ‘We put a lot of emphasis on connecting with people in the real world’
• (Video) The ABS-CBN-Multiply Trade Event

One of the successful Multiply communities launched by ABS-CBN Interactive centered on the Pinoy Big Brother Teen Edition Plus show. The show now has two sites - the official one where profiles and schedules are posted and a Multiply site where PBB fans can go online.

Pineda said one local call center that advertised on Multiply was able to attract recruits through its Multiply community site.

"It’s more of these community building efforts online for Filipinos worldwide. We want to really try to populate the brand and get more people to understand it and work on the advertising and get the brands to see that this is really a safe place to put your brand in," he said.

Real-world relationships

Hersh said Multiply currently has nine million registered users worldwide, of which 2.2 million are Filipinos. He said that while the growth of Multiply has been slower compared to other social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, it is the real-world relationships in Multiply that sets it apart and ensures its longevity.

"If your online social network is full of people that you have no real world connection to, there’s very little reason to keep you there and it’s very easy for you to switch. But on Multiply, it’s your real-world social network online and your content and it’s the discussion that goes on around that content that’s going to keep you coming back," he said.

Adds Pezaris: "It’s closer, deeper relationships which enables the sharing of personal, meaningful content to you and the continuing sharing of that is the personal documentation of your life online. Over a period of time, you build up this history like a living scrapbook of what’s happening in your life and it’s a collaborative effort because while you add to it, all your friends and family add to it also and that’s what really develops the long-term value."
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)