Message of Julius D Mariveles, DNX Executive Editor
For the Bilib Awards 2021
22 May 2021
To be recognized as the Best Digital Media Outlet for 2021 by Communication students under the Events Management Class of the University of St. La Salle-Bacolod and the Communication Society is significant in many ways.
First, it comes after a year of tough coverage of the COVID pandemic that left us battered and bruised physically, emotionally, financially.
COVID was a real experience for us. It came inside the newsroom when one of our staff tested positive and four of us were swabbed.
We had to shut down operations for 15 days.
Throughout the toughest time of the Enhanced Community Quarantine, we decided to continue covering, sending staff to the field despite great personal risks.
It was the right thing to do as reporters.
It was a time when the public needed us the most to shed light on their fears even as we, too, were afraid.
It was the time when access to information and freedom of the Press had to be practiced by storytellers and not to be merely given lip service or honored in occasional press releases.
Journalism is the core value of Digital News Exchange, a news and information platform founded in honor of journalism.
To be singled out by Communication students for this award is a distinct honor, coming as it is from those who might become journalists in the future, they who have made the digital platform their primary source of news and information.
To be the lone nominee in this category fills our small newsroom with a sense of pride and humility, a bigger sense of responsibility knowing that a future generation is looking at us.
We can only hope that we can inspire them more than they have inspired us.
Journalism is competing for relevance amid open sources of information and as it is being hijacked by partisan political, and ideological interests.
Journalists in the Philippines are struggling to survive as markets shrink and as the practice and craft is increasingly getting unattractive for new practitioners, and as journalists come under increasing attacks from State and non-State actors.
We share this award with our readers, with those who helped us like Internews in our most troubling times, our fellow awardees – Aksyon Radyo Bacolod, Love Radio, and the Visayan Daily Star – that won in their respective categories, and to all reporters in the province struggling for survival and relevance.
We live in troubling times and we, your storytellers share your hopes and fears.
This award reminds us to hope for the fire of journalism might flicker but it can, in the words of the great journalist Ed Murrow about television, “teach, illuminate, and it can even inspire.”
Thank you, Bilib Awards 2021.
