Print and radio reporters and editors in Baguio city north of Manila took part in the rural poverty reporting training of the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project on October 29.

The one-day training, co-organized by the Benguet-Baguio chapter of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), equipped participants with knowledge on basic human rights concepts, rural poverty as news subject, and the importance of reporting rural poverty issues.

The training came at a time when the Baguio and Benguet media were monitoring the case of activist James Balao who has now been missing for more than a month. The 47-year-old Ibaloi, founding member of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance, was allegedly abducted by military in lower Tomay village in La Trinidad, Benguet on September 17 but the latter denied any involvement.

Trainer Rowena Paraan, NUJP director, said covering rural poverty issues is part of media’s duty to give platform to the voiceless and the disadvantaged in society.

“Most award-winning stories are stories on poverty, especially if they are well presented and retold truthfully,” said Paraan.

Journalists identified several barriers in reporting poverty, which are also similar to barriers experienced by journalists in other provinces. These include (1) poverty being a ‘depressing’ or negative issue; (2) bias or non-priority of editors of poverty stories; (3) lack of space, time and resources; (4) journalists reporting on poverty tagged as anti-government; and (5) lack of reliable information.

But journalists themselves identified solutions to these problems. Training for both reporters and editors such as this one should continue, they said. Finding more creative ways to package rural poverty stories could also convince editors here and in Manila to use them, the participants also said.

Paraan said journalists doing their work with utmost ethical and professional standards help resolve perceptions that they are anti-government or ‘communists.’

On the issue of lack of information, Red Batario of the Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD) said journalists must be able to assert their right to access to information as enshrined in the Constitution. He also discussed current campaigns of media and civil society organizations for an access to information law as means to fight corruption and fraud in government. CCJD is taking the lead in developing a manual on human rights reporting of the Project.

Before ending, the journalists had a workshop on story ideas on rural poverty. Among those which surfaced were the impact of industrialization to communities’ traditional sources; displacement of rural communities and increasing poverty amid operations of large scale nickel and gold mining firms; and commercialization of indigenous cultures as way out of poverty, such as selling indigenous products or posing and dancing for Baguio tourists in exchange of fees.