[Inside the Newsroom] We asked Ateneo students to cover their Black Friday protest

On Thursday, June 18, I reposted the call of the Ateneo Seniors’ Alliance for members of the graduating class to wear black bands during their Friday commencement (and throughout the weekend programs), and to join the walkout after that. 

“We simply cannot act as if everything is normal,” the post said. “Let us respond to this pain with solidarity. Solidarity with the families and teammates of Rene [Baterbonia] and Divine [Adili], with a nation that continues to seek answers, and with a community that demands its own home to do better.” 

The students’ conviction, courage, and compassion were humbling and inspiring in the face of the university administration’s slow, rather cold, and inadequate response to the tragedy that was the death of two student-athletes in a school-sanctioned activity. 

“Sa ganitong mga pagkakataon, mabubuhay ang pananampalataya mo na may pag-asa pa ang bayan” was my caption. (Moments like this rekindle your faith that there is still hope for the country.) 

You know what else I realized has reason to hope? The field — the vocation — of journalism. Here’s why: 

We gathered the current batch of interns and volunteers from Ateneo who are working with Rappler’s different units. 

The assignment: to cover the Black Friday protest on their own campus, where their friends and classmates, teachers, and manongs and manangs of the non-teaching staff would likely join. 

The challenge: to trust their hearts without losing their heads, to put their journalist’s lens on without glossing over what they see as members of the community. 

The goal: to bring to Rappler’s broader platform the immeasurable grief and soul-searching that their community is going through, and which the nation has largely come to embrace as its own.

Because who else can best capture the community’s pain and indignation, the agony of loving an institution and exacting accountability from it at the same time? Ateneans themselves.  

This has always been my stand: The community — any community — knows its heart best, hears its voice best, tells its story best. Ateneo, amid this tragedy, is no different. 

You could sense that in what our interns and volunteers from Katipunan crafted for the titles of their updates and captions for their photos that they shared primarily on the Rappler Community app, and for the video clips they picked for our production team: “Ateneo, do better!” “Hustisya para kay Rene at Divine!” “Atenista, walk out na!” “Ateneo, ba’t ang hirap mong mahalin?” “Kasama nating magluksa ang langit.” “Kailangan nating higitan pa.” 

READ: 

• IN PHOTOS: Black armbands, walkout mark Ateneo graduation day after Adili, Baterbonia deaths
• Ateneans ask university to ‘do better’ as graduates, students mourn Baterbonia, Adili deaths 

Ava Dumaup put it best on behalf of their group: “Throughout the afternoon of Friday, June 19, it became increasingly difficult to draw a clean line between myself as a journalist and as a student…. The task seemed much larger to me than simply documenting what was unfolding. It was to render legible a community’s anger, grief, and hopes for people who could only encounter them at a distance. The story we had been entrusted to tell was, in many ways, our own.”

Allow me to call them the Stellar Seven: Sophia Isabel Bautista, James Mark Caponpon, Maria Cassandra Dueñas, Ava Noelle Dumaup, Raine Goco, Daryll Malik Ledonio, and Ma. Karina Isabel Victorino. 

They were accurate and fast. They were adept, like they could get past professional journalists who are stuck in the old ways of coverage. They knew what they were covering by heart and paired that advantage with the levelheadedness expected of journalists. 

I pointed out to them that the protest and their coverage were happening on the birth anniversary of Ateneo’s greatest alumnus, Jose Rizal. 

And what did Rizal say of our youth? Sila ang pag-asa ng bayan. 

May I add? Silang campus journalists ang pag-asa ng mahusay, makatao, at may-pusong pamamahayag. – Rappler.com

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