[The Wide Shot] Journalism 101, the Jesuit way

This is a modified version of an article originally published in the March 2024 edition of ‘The Windhover: The Philippine Jesuit Magazine.’ Rappler is republishing this in commemoration of the Feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, on July 31.

Once, I asked my students to watch a press conference of then-president Rodrigo Duterte. “Write a story about it,” I said. “Choose the best angle.”

Duterte, as usual, was rambling — first talking about the pandemic, then segueing to the International Criminal Court and his bloody drug war, then discussing the government’s vaccination program for COVID-19. As expected, my students were stumped. They took down notes without knowing where to start or end.

“How can we pick the best angle when it is so confusing?” one of my students asked.

“Listen to your feelings,” I answered.

I teach journalism at the University of Santo Tomas, a pontifical university run by the Dominicans, and every time I hear this question, it is my training in a Jesuit school that comes back to me. 

In my 10 years at Ateneo de Manila University (four years of high school, four years of college, and two years of graduate school), things like listening to my feelings – and naming them – were constant refrains especially whenever I underwent silent retreats or even the 18th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises, called the Retreat in Daily Life.

It’s a training that comes in handy, now that I am marking my 16th year as a professional journalist (or my 20th year, if I am to count my years as a student journalist working for Ateneo’s The Guidon). It’s a way of proceeding that helps me fulfill my day-to-day job as senior reporter covering religion for Rappler.

Allow me to list at least three ways by which my training in a Jesuit school, as well as my encounters with the Jesuits and their lay collaborators, have shaped my work not only in a spiritual but also in a technical way.

1. The power of feelings

Why do I tell my students to listen to their feelings?

I believe that emotions are the best barometer of what’s newsworthy or not. Wherever your heart jumps, THAT is most likely the story. 

I think one of the common rookie mistakes in journalism is to “overintellectualize” the act of picking story angles. “What will make me sound more intelligent?” a beginner might ask. But the prime task of a journalist is not to sound intelligent (though of course that’s an important part of our job). Our mission is to make people CARE.

How can the audience care if the journalist himself or herself hardly feels anything about the story? It’s the journalist who first needs to feel angry, happy, sad, amused, or inspired about a story (yes, that’s the Rappler Mood Meter right there). Before the journalist can write a story, he or she needs to listen to his or her feelings first. 

Emotions are the starting point of discernment – even in deciding story angles. (But note that it is only a starting point. In editorial decision-making, we still need to weigh our gut feelings against traditional “news values” such as relevance, proximity, timeliness. Then we can decide if a story is newsworthy.)

I learned much about emotions from the Jesuits.

Anyone who has attended an Ignatian retreat (named after the founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius of Loyola), can attest to their “discernment of spirits.” In many other retreats, the focus is listening to a preacher. In Ignatian retreats, the focus is staying silent, naming one’s feelings, and listening to a God who speaks personally. A retreat guide is there to guide — not to dictate. 

In an article titled “Emotions: A Practical Map for Your Inner Journey,” José Sanchez writes that while “being analytical is second nature” to many of us, we need to acknowledge and name our feelings. We need “to move beyond analysis and control, and start identifying patterns in our emotions,” he adds in this article on the “Jesuits in Canada” website.

“In the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius emphasizes the importance of recognizing what is stirring inside us. It can be new ideas, gut feelings, or something else entirely. Whatever it may be, when those thoughts stir something inside, we are to sit up and take notice. Ignatius invites us to name that feeling, to admit it for better or worse, and to have a conversation with God about it. Are they invitations or temptations? Are they of God or not of God?” explains Sanchez.

“Listening to our inner movements is essential for living a fulfilling life,” he adds. “It helps us stay grounded in the present moment, gain insight into our emotions, and identify patterns in our lives.”

God speaks through our feelings, although we need the guardrails of intellect — and religious teachings — so that we can authentically discern the will of God.

2. ‘Meron’

In the news business, it is most convenient to resort to stereotypes or to put people in neat boxes because, well, who doesn’t like formulas or templates? “This politician? Ah, corrupt.” “This priest? Ah, kind.” “This event? Oh, the usual, nothing new to report.”

But I often remember my philosophy professor, the great Father Roque Ferriols, SJ – fondly known as Padre Roque – who died at the age of 96 on August 15, 2021. Ferriols, who taught us philosophy of the human person in 2006, always cautioned us against forms of katamaran (laziness) that make us think of persons as ideas that we can manipulate — not living, breathing beings whose existence we need to respect.

Ferriols was the philosopher of meron, a word roughly translated into English as “there is.” He also emphasized the kalooban — the inner depths of a person. He challenged us to see the world as it is — to pierce the veil, to look deeper into each person, to gaze at their eyes and dive into a deep, deep ocean waiting to be explored.

“Ano ba ang tumingin, ang makakita? (What does it mean to look, to see?)” Ferriols asks in his book Pambungad sa Metapisika (Introduction to Metaphysics). Is there a manual or a point-by-point guide to seeing in a philosophical way? For Ferriols, the act of seeing cannot be truly explained, except to tell the person asking, “Dumilat ka (Open your eyes).”

Years after I sat in Padre Roque’s philosophy class, I heard his voice in the words of our managing editor at that time (now our executive editor), Glenda M. Gloria, when she instructed me to revise an article 12 years ago. “When covering protests,” she told me in a tense email, “activate all senses – eyes, nose, ears.” She said, “Reporters should always try to cover with innocent eyes.” 

Covering with “with innocent eyes,” I later learned, is key to uncovering the world — where every person is a story waiting to be told.

Laging meron.

3. Finding a story in all things

Whenever I deployed a reporter for news coverages when I was Rappler’s news editor, or whenever I send students out on assignment, one of the comments that frustrate me is that “there is no story.”

If it is a press conference by a politician, perhaps it can be true that there is no story. Politicians, after all, spew out motherhood statements all the time. But if it is for a feature article, like when a journalist is sent to look for any kind of story in a barangay or a parish, I really cannot believe the excuse that “there is no story.” 

In spirituality and in journalism (ah, in fact, they can be one and the same), the words of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, ring true: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” 

The world is full of wonders, and there is no reason for a journalist not find any story in human communities. The vendor, the street sweeper, the laughter, the sound of the tricycles, the kid who offered you a meal: look, look deeply, and find the story.

We can find a story — we can find God — in all things.

4. ‘Creative tensions’

While the title of this article is “Journalism 101,” I have to warn you that there is no clear roadmap to being a journalist. As in the case of Jesuits, our lives are filled with tension — in the way Fathers William Barry, SJ, and William Doherty, SJ, describe the tensions of Jesuit spirituality, in their book Contemplatives In Action: The Jesuit Way.

Barry and Doherty depict Jesuit spirituality as “a set of life-giving and creative tensions.” They write, “Jesuit spirituality functions best when these tensions are alive and clearly felt, that is, when Jesuits experience in themselves the pull of both sides of each polarity.”

It’s the kind of tension seen in the first Jesuit pontiff — Pope Francis — who upholds church teaching on issues like homosexuality and divorce, on the one hand, while caring for same-sex couples and divorced husbands and wives, on the other.

“Jesuits are at their best, for example, when they are attracted to spending much time in prayer and have to control that attraction for the sake of their apostolic activity, or when Jesuit theologians experience the tension of being faithful Roman Catholics and of searching for new ways to express the truths of faith in a different age and culture,” Barry and Doherty explained.

Like Jesuit spirituality, journalism is filled with “life-giving and creative tensions.”

Journalism, for one, is a profession that thrives in intellectual humility — but, as part of our job, we also need to publicize our work, sometimes to the point that people idolize us or become our fans. How can we manage the tension between humility and fame? What about other things — like the ability to keep secrets and the need to report matters of public interest?

We can only bow our heads and seek the grace of God, the Editor of editors, who gave us our assignment and who, in his mercy, will help us write the story of our lives. – Rappler.com