Last Saturday, media practitioners from across the Davao region gathered at Holy Cross of Davao for a rare, clear-eyed discussion on artificial intelligence and its impact on regional storytelling. Supported by the Ayala Foundation, the one-day workshop provided a vital framework for engaging with AI—particularly within the realities of local newsrooms navigating a lack of support infrastructure that often hinders regional competitiveness.
Keynote speaker Jaemark Tordecillas, who previously led newsroom digitalization as editor of GMA News Online, illustrated how AI applications extend far beyond simple transcription and text summarization. Highlighting data-mining techniques, Tordecillas demonstrated how automated analysis of complex public datasets—such as National Health Survey metrics on stunting, teenage pregnancy, and contraceptive access—can surface critical, under-reported stories essential to public policy and community welfare.
Every time a new wave of technology breaks over our newsrooms, the refrain sounds familiar: this changes everything, and nothing will ever be the same.
Having been in the media profession for some time, we experienced firsthand how it was decades ago, when newsrooms traded typewriter ribbons for glowing CRT monitors, and thermal fax paper gave way to digital inboxes. We felt it when social media algorithms disrupted print schedules, instantly turning every smartphone holder into a publisher. Today, as generative AI enters newsrooms, creative studios, and university classrooms across Davao, that familiar anxiety returns. Generative tools can draft reports in seconds, pull insights from vast spreadsheets before you can reach for your calculator, and format copy with precision.
Naturally, the existential question surfaces in quiet conversations in bars and coffee shops where senior journalists meet. Are journalists becoming obsolete? Is the craft of the regional storyteller being handed over to just anybody?
The short answer—for those who live and breathe journalism—is no. But the real answer requires us to step back from the technological noise and remember why local community journalism exists in the first place.
Machines excel at processing patterns, organizing raw data, and predicting the next logical word. An algorithm can digest a hundred pages of a city council ordinance, summarize a complex court filing, or transcribe hours of interview audio in minutes. That is speed and efficiency—mechanics that free a reporter to do actual reporting.
What no algorithm can do, however, is walk the trails to a remote barangay, look at the rubble of a demolished community in Boulevard, or catch the pain in the voice of a mother anguishing over her child’s health. An algorithm cannot sit on a wooden chair in a crowded school gym and feel the anxiety of evacuees as their houses are washed away by raging waters. It has no lived memory of Davao’s streets, and no personal stake in the future of Mindanao.
This is why it remains so difficult to reconstruct the history of Davao City. Even the fairly recent Kadayawan Festival history had city councilors and city executives scrambling for data, for lack of reliable documents—a dilemma resolved only through archival records and interviews provided by the Davao Historical Society.
The task of editors, journalists, and media educators is neither to panic nor to blindly surrender to automated convenience. It is to hold the line for the human element. The core work of the local press has never been merely manufacturing sentences; it is about witnessing, verifying, framing, and caring deeply about the community we serve.
Technology will keep evolving, but readers do not turn to a trusted local page simply for quick words. They turn to it for accountability, for regional context, and for a voice grounded in the very soil they walk on.
Tools will change with the times, but the human heart behind the story—that remains all that matters.
