By Nora Soriño

LIKE many other creatures in this mortal world of ours, there were several, well, “imperfections” I would say, in this paper.

That was during the ’90s. For instance, at one point, then-President Fidel V. Ramos was seen in a front-page picture, saluting with his left hand.

“What, a president of this country making a left-hand salute?” That was a remark I heard.

It seemed unlikely that a president like FVR would commit such kind of faux. Hmm…

Later, it was learned that the placement of the picture’s negative had been Inverted Hence, the left-handed salute, hahaha.

But things like these are really no laughing matter. I bet the particular department received some lashings from Ernesto “Toto”' Chu.

And then in another instance, I heard of at least one comment of a caption of a picture saying that “the caption below said that Alan Flores at the beginning meant that the guy is the ‘suspect.’ But at the end of the caption, it seemed that said guy is the victim!”

From where I sat at the city public plaza, I could hear and see two guys laughing even as from time to time, they were looking at me.

Oh, what the heck, laughing at something that really was no laughing matter, I then thought. By the way, that guy I mentioned has no relation to the former mayor here, who's a lawyer too by that same name. Like there's another guy by the name of Joe Biden who's a Chinese with no relation to the current president of the United States.

The founder/ CEO, Ernesto “Toto” Chu also made it a point to visit the bureaus one at a time so maybe to assess what support they could further give to us, the provincial bureaus.

But looking back at it now, I’d say that those kinds of “errors” or “mistakes” were just “birth pangs” so to speak. For the editors are good. So good that at one point, during the 30-year gathering of this paper, a reporter referred to them as “terrors.”

For one, during those days, among the main source of passing on some reports was by fax machine then. And for several times, we in this bureau would write them by longhand.

Maybe that was true too in other bureaus.

I could then visualize the herculean efforts the editors did just to "'decode" what we in the bureaus were saying.

Hence, their “terror” attitude at times, per reveal of a reporter. Because maybe, the editors themselves were in a way “terrorized” by us, the well, the “promdi” writers!

Email: norasorino2@gmail. com