ASPIRING REPORTERS should go beyond surface-level answers when pursuing stories to discover underlying angles that may not be obvious to the public eye, a veteran journalist and Artlets graduate said.
During his lecture in a forum titled “Storytelling in Journalism,” Philippine Daily Inquirer executive editor and The Flame alumnus Volt Contreras urged student journalists to ask probing questions that would help them unpack stories in a critical and in-depth approach.
“The stories you will write will depend on the answers. All the questions you will ask, that’s one key… You discover things by preparing your questions [and by] being ready [to ask] probing questions. Don’t settle for simple answers,” Contreras said on March 19 at the UST Albertus Magnus Auditorium.
“Don’t be content with simple statements… Aim for answers that produce a vivid image in mind. That’s the beauty of language, that’s what you should discover,’ he added.
The Journalism alumnus recalled his experience in covering the aftermath of the 2006 mudslide incident in Southern Leyte. Through precise questions, Contreras said he was able to pick out compelling details, such as the victims and corpses who were lined up on the sidewalk each with a candle beside them, which helped him narrate the story more accurately.
He added that encouraging the rescuer, who was his source at that time, to recount specific and emotional aspects enabled him to elicit a vivid account of the calamity.
“So, you can imagine the kind of paragraph I formed from those lines of questions. If I were just satisfied with his answer that ‘there were many [victims],’ ‘the funeral home was so full,’ then we wouldn’t be able to get the details that the sidewalk looked like a tomb or cemetery with a candle for everybody,” he said.
Contreras served as editor of The Flame, the official student publication of the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters, in 1991.
In the same forum, Philippine Daily Inquirer sports editor Francis Ochoa lamented the rise of “self-publishing” athletes who compete with sports journalists by controlling their own narratives on social media.
“Technology is starting to make us unneeded anymore and the athletes also feel like they can cut out the middleman and tell their stories straight to the audience,” the Journalism alumnus said.
Ochoa, who was recently elected as president of the Philippine Sportswriters Association, urged sports journalists to refine their storytelling skills and strive for more than the mere statistics of a game.
“The key is to tell stories better. Integrity remains the number one challenge for journalists today,” he said.
The forum was organized by the Inquirer Campus Talks and the UST Department of Journalism. Also present during the event was Philippine Daily Inquirer chief operating officer Rudyard Arbolado, who gave the welcoming remarks. F — Raymond Vince Manaloto
