Your favorite community weekly paper, the Dumaguete MetroPost, is now 14 years old. Thanks to our loyal readers and supporters, we’ve managed to keep our heads above water in keeping with our motto: “Empowering people through information.”
No, we didn’t throw a party to mark the date. It was simply another day at the office.
This paper started as a dream of a businessman, Manuel “Chiquiting” Sagarbarria, in the year 2000. He published the newspaper for two years until he decided to concentrate on his original businesses in 2002 and turned over the reins of the paper to the Unitown Publishing House, which continues to run the paper to this day.
Running a weekly paper in a small community like Dumaguete is no mean feat. You have to cultivate and maintain a following in terms of readership and support. This means doing more than just getting any kind of information to fill up the paper’s limited pages. It means continually being on the lookout to determine our readers’ changing tastes and interests.
To a large extent, we have been proven right. Our yearly nominations to the country’s most prestigious newspaper awards prove that we are on the correct path. We garnered the nominations for all five categories for the Visayas in 2007 and won the Best Editorial Page award for that year, which is a perfect tribute to our untiring and outstanding columnists and newswriters.
Last year, we garnered the nominations for all but one of the categories for the Visayas.
This year, your newspaper is again a nominee in the annual awards. You can, therefore, take pride in the fact that the paper you’re holding is actually one of the best weekly newspapers in the Philippines (or at least in the Visayas).
But despite our modest gains, we don’t sit back and rest on our laurels, for we believe that a newspaper is only as good as its last issue. That’s why we keep trying to outdo ourselves every time.
We know we came out with a good issue when we get feedback from our readers confirming what we feel.
However, when we produce an issue which could have been better written or edited, we take consolation from the words of American humorist and radio personality Garrison Keillor: “A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.”
