Young Roots
Punchin’ beyond 58!
By Johanne R. Macob
OUR Sunday Punch has been around since 1956. Though I knew about The PUNCH when I was still in high school (thanks to my active involvement in our school paper), it wasn’t until my senior year in college when I fully understood what it stands for.
We were in our last year in UP-Baguio pursuing a degree in Journalism when we were required to undergo internship in a newspaper to finally complete the course. Since there were around 40 or so of us in the class, the newspapers based in our host city, Baguio, couldn’t accommodate everyone. So the Manila natives were asked to find publications in Manila and we, the Pangasinenses were asked to look for community newspapers in the province.
As it turned out, the Manila students were eventually absorbed by the Baguio newspapers upon the request of our Prof. Rolly Fernandez in consideration of their plight having to commute to-and-fro Manila regularly (a six-hour trip). In our case, since Pangasinan is just two hours away from Baguio, we, Pangasinenses, had to submit a list of community newspapers for possible internship. Sunday Punch, expectedly, was on our list. What surprised us was our professor’s reaction to our list. He told us, Pangasinense-Journ majors, to contact Sunday Punch for our internship, just Sunday Punch, and he crossed out the others. I became curious – what makes Sunday Punch different from the rest of our community papers, that a highly respected professor at the University of the Philippines and the North Luzon bureau chief of Philippine Daily Inquirer, would choose nothing else but Sunday Punch for us.
Sunday Punch granted our request and we became interns for around four months. Today, it’s been two years since I started my professional affiliation with it as one of its correspondents. I have since explored the province, written stories and a number of commentaries. I have already been included in a libel case over a news story that I and six others had nothing to do with, obviously merely to harass my editor and us.
Summing up I learned that the very essence of our Sunday Punch can be found in its every issue, the Socrates’ dictum on its masthead, “No Man is to be Reverenced More than the Truth.”
In spite of all the harassments it has been getting, I believe Sunday Punch will go far beyond its 58 years of public service, continuously defining community journalism for the province of Pangasinan, and even for the rest of the country.
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