On 23 November 2009, 58 people were kidnapped and slaughtered in Maguindanao province, southern Philippines. Women in the group were raped, shot and mutilated. The bodies were buried by use of an earthmoving construction tractor. At least 34 of the victims were journalists. This was the worst media atrocity in the country’s history.

Not only did police fail to stop the well-organised massacre – they took part. Policemen, accompanied by hundreds of armed civilian “volunteers”, blocked the convoy the victims were in and directed it to the killing ground. Of the 196 people now being tried for the crime, 61 are from the Philippines National Police (PNP).

The Ampatuan Massacre, named after the warlord clan accused of perpetrating it, bloodily drove home the central problem of the PNP. It is institutionally weak and subservient to local politicians. A 2005 study of the 137,000-member PNP done by the UNDP points out that “the authority being exercised by local government units over the internal operations and decision-making of the PNP creates an environment extremely vulnerable to undue politicisation of the police force.” Rather than enforce the law, policemen end up enforcing the will of a local leader.

On the wrong side of the law

According to Jesse Robredo, secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) “the problem, in varying degrees, has existed for a long time”. It’s a huge problem but far from being the only one. Beset with poor training, scant equipment and corruption, law enforcers have a dismal record. Far too often, they are on the wrong side of the law.

In late 2009, a video surfaced of a Manila police officer torturing a prisoner to death. A few months after, another policeman was charged with raping a female prisoner. Higher up the command chain, last year, the government filed corruption charges against a group of former and active PNP officers involved in a 2008 trip to Moscow where one of the officers was caught carrying € 105,000 in undeclared cash.

Even when the cops spring into action to do their jobs, they can be catastrophically inept. Last August, in Manila, a gunman – a sacked police officer – held a bus full of tourists from Hong Kong hostage. The PNP’s rescue attempt went disastrously wrong. A bumbling, slow-motion assault led to a shootout that killed eight of 25 hostages, as well as the kidnapper.

Organised crime, however, is hardly impressed by law enforcers in the Philippines. At the start of this year, the PNP proclaimed it would crack down on “car-nappers” – armed violent gangs who snatch vehicles by stopping them and forcing the owners out. Rather than duck their heads and go into hiding, the gangs responded by continuing to hijack cars the week after the announcement.

After a bomb explosion killed five aboard a passenger bus in Manila in late January, the Australian embassy issued a travel warning about “the high threat of terrorist attack and the high level of serious crime”. This was certainly not an endorsement of police capacities.

Statistics show that PNP capabilities are indeed limited. According to the UNDP study, over 20,000 PNP members did not have firearms in 2004. Those who did were issued only 28 rounds of ammunition for one year, with another 10 for marksmanship training. While it needed 25,000 handheld radios, the PNP only had 2,280. This January, a paper surfaced showing that in nine of the country’s 15 regions, nearly 80?% of police investigators have had no formal training.

The entire feature can be found in Development and Cooperation magazine (D+C)

At that time, newspapers in the Philippines were only beginning to go online. The general  attitude towards online news was disdain. One editor in chief said she couldn’t see a time when print journalism would be supplanted by digital media. A section editor in another paper said he just was unable to imagine that “people would prefer to stare at monitors rather than leaf through a well-made newspaper.”

Oh, it gets better (I assure you, that nasty sound you hear in the background isn’t me  cackling. Honest!) Another newspaper editor in chief said “looking at a screen is more  tiring” than reading words on paper. Condescendingly, both editors-in-chief said the  internet would have the most impact on research, and how journalists did their work.

The stories we ran in that magazine a dozen years ago listed other arguments against online news: it couldn’t be “validated”; there was no income model (prophetic words); access was  expensive and connections slow and what they hey, “you can’t take the computer with you to  the bathroom.”

Anyway let’s gingerly fast forward to today. It’s a year where you can now get your content  not just from your desktop and inexpensive netbook, but also through your UMPC, cellphone  and smartphone (have I missed any devices?) In the US newspapers are folding up fast — as dead as the trees which gave  them their pulp. Online news has already supplanted print in terms of audience and is very  slowly inching up towards broadcast media. What’s playing out in the US is that “bring out  your dead” scene from the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — only instead of poor  peasants, its newspapers saying “I’m not dead yet!”

In the Philippines, every newspaper and broadcast studio has a website and competition is  ferocious. Newspapers are still publishing but circulation (never very high to begin with)  is falling off, partly because of scale: it’s actually more expensive to print more copies.  In no way do the print media come close to the reach of online. Because of the Philippines  peculiar economic structure — 10 per cent of its population is working abroad sustaining  the country with billions of dollars every year (Wired magazine called it the first ever distributed economy) — the sites are probably most read abroad, in the US, in the Middle East, wherever Filipino overseas workers have access.

I’ve just heard that one Manila broadsheet has actually succeeded in selling itself for P4 billion pesos (US$80 million) to an investor who I believe has more money than common sense. The newspaper, which is only about 23 years old certainly hit the jackpot, it was selling in effect nothing for gold. What is the guy buying? Archives, a distribution system, a brand name. We can go over the actual value each of these things in detail much later.

Over in the states, a former editor of Time magazine wrote a leader where he said that there is one way newspapers can survive. Everyone must pay. Instead of giving away their content online, newspapers should start charging “micropayments” — a dollar for a month of use of their content, for instance. You heard that right: to save precious newspapers everyone must be forced to pay. Where does this guy live? What he’s asking for is an environment that  must somehow be created (and the rules enforced) such that nobody can get the content for  free, otherwise it will subvert the whole idea. This sounds like a cartel or a monopoly.

I think part of the problem is that newspapers are obsessing too much over the “paper” part  of their names: I believe they should resign themselves to the fact that paper as we know it is on the way down. This might not be the case yet in many countries, but it will happen as  surely as each person in those countries gets a telephone. Is this cause for despair? I don’t think so. It isn’t that newspapers are irrelevant, they still have something strong to  offer. They just have to think hard of HOW they’re going to offer it

More on this later