Bernadette Soriano

Under institutional light, journalism forfeits process for product. Inquiry is sidelined; performance, optimized. What should endure becomes rehearsed—technically sound, intellectually hollow.


What should have been a pipeline is rendered a phase: ornate, short-lived, and easily discarded.

Such framing exposes the system’s failure more than the students’. Reducing journalism to a seasonal task enacts pedagogical amnesia, erasing its evolving purpose of selfhood it very holds. 

Campus journalism in basic education functions less as a continuous program than as an annual performance cycle. Centered on the DSPC–RSPC–NSPC sequence, it reduces journalistic practice to contest preparation. Though officially year-round, campus papers lie dormant until season approaches.

Training compresses into last-minute coaching. Students learn to replicate past winners, emphasizing format and rubric conformity over judgment or inquiry. Insight yields to formula.

Moderators, often untrained, focus on drills over dialogue; publication is sidelined, archives neglected, and memory reset annually.

The system rewards contest success, not journalistic growth. Students write for judges, not readers. When contests end, so does the newsroom.

Erikson’s identity theory sees adolescence as self-integration; contest journalism, however, demands scripted performances dictated by scores and deadlines—yielding fragmentation, a detour from true vocation to hollow validation.

Through Erving Goffman’s lens, the student is an actor, the judge a simulated audience, the paper a fleeting stage. Backstage fades—no scripts persist, no memory remains. Each issue haunts only plaques and certificates. Stripped of culture and lineage, journalism fractures into isolated, ephemeral acts.

Episodic education breeds episodic commitment.

Villanueva’s 2024 study reveals sporadic training and fractured mentorship in Candon City’s campus papers. Manuals lie abandoned; moderators prioritize contest rules over journalistic rigor. Ladia’s 2021 research in Region III confirms unstable policies and half-hearted implementation of the Campus Journalism Act. The so-called pipeline is less a conduit than a sieve—leaky, disjointed, and incapable of sustaining true journalistic growth.

The psychological toll seeps quietly, corrosive and deep. Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory names autonomy, competence, relatedness—the triad of motivation’s heart. The contest model dismantles all three: autonomy shackled by inflexible rubrics, competence reduced to a verdict’s whim, relatedness severed in the isolation of writing not for community, but for cold scores.

Such conditioning rewires thought itself. Kahneman’s dual-system theory warns loud and clear: System 1—fast, intuitive, error-prone—dominates under contest pressure, demanding haste over depth. System 2—slow, deliberative, critical—wilts, starved of time and space. The long inquiry, the probing editorial, the painstaking rewrite—luxuries sacrificed at the altar of the ticking clock.
Institutional memory decays at contest pace. Stylebooks vanish. Archives fossilize in forgotten folders. Most student publications operate without continuity structures—training fragmented, mentorship informal, funding erratic. The newsroom resets yearly. No ladder to climb. No legacy to inherit. Just a revolving door of lost potential.

And so, journalism becomes a footnote—something students “used to do,” a season stitched in uniforms and rubrics. Even those who pursue the newsroom later carry a foundational hollowness: trained in the choreography of submission, not the rigor of truth.

Their survival speaks less of a system that worked, more of a self that refused collapse.

The pipeline does exist, albeit undernourished. Those who make it from campus journalism to media work often do so in that of informal support: a mentor who offered thoughtful critique, an editor who stayed late to guide, a senior who shared practical knowledge beyond titles. These moments of help are not part of any formal program but happen by chance—rare, inconsistent, yet crucial.

This absence is no accident; it is systemic. Campus journalism becomes ritual, never rite. Administrators call it a “stepping stone,” yet build no stairs. Editorial work is reduced to a requirement; publication, a seasonal game. Risk is reframed as liability. Safe stories win applause; critical voices are hushed—not for error, but for discomfort.

Psychologically, this breeds learned editorial helplessness. The student-journalist takes in that breaking the mold invites punishment, that ambition is unsafe, and their role temporary. Philip Jackson’s “hidden curriculum” resurfaces: students grasp not only the content but the rules that allow it to endure—learning not just how to write, but when to stay silent.

What alarms most is how this hollowing out calcifies into institution. Schools and divisions prize medals over meaning. Form triumphs over function, passing down a fading legacy—a journalism meant for civic discourse, reduced instead to scholastic display.

To reframe this trajectory demands a shift—from journalism as a transient phase to journalism as a sustained pipeline; from episodic acts to cumulative growth. It necessitates structures that propel students forward rather than extract mere performance. Central to this is the reconceptualization of moderators: no longer contest coaches but newsroom mentors, charged with fostering critical inquiry and ethical rigor.

Training must transcend last-minute drills and rote replication, confronting the latent compromises that surface when emphasis skews toward medals and rankings—dynamics that subtly erode rigor and equity. Only through transparent, consistent, and principled instruction can the pipeline be fortified.

Yet any critique must contend with DepEd’s harsh realities: persistent underfunding constricts resources, compresses training, and limits moderator development. The contest system, though imperfect, endures as a pragmatic solution amid tight budgets and competing demands. Managing multilayered conferences across thousands of schools forces compromises—often at the expense of sustained mentorship.

Moderators, drawn from unrelated fields and burdened with full workloads, operate within these tight confines. Institutional pressures steer focus toward contest readiness, leaving little room to nurture newsroom growth beyond competition season.

This context neither excuses nor diminishes the system’s shortcomings but situates them. Without addressing these structural constraints, calls for deeper journalistic formation risk overlooking the realities shaping moderator roles.

Equally vital is the preservation of institutional memory—through archives, mentorship, and iterative feedback loops—constructing continuity where only fragmentation exists. Absent such reform, the system will persist in privileging compliance over curiosity, trophies over truth.

Constructivist learning insists knowledge is not given but forged through experience. Journalism, therefore, demands being lived, not merely rehearsed. The pipeline must embrace failure, iteration, dissent. Students must write to challenge, not just to please; to understand not only the “how,” but the urgent “why.”

Schools must see journalism not as a stage for the eloquent, but a forum for the curious. 
Campus papers must transcend year-end trophies to become living conversations with their communities.

When journalism is seen as a phase, it builds no future. But when grounded in memory, mentorship, and purpose, it ensures not just survival, but the full bloom of its promise. In that continuity, truth need not hide; it is nurtured, spoken, and sustained.