How Filipinos get their news today

HOW does the Filipino know what is happening in his country?

The answer has changed radically in barely a generation. Twenty years ago, Filipinos watched the evening newscast, listened to radio or bought a newspaper. Today they open Facebook, YouTube, TikTok or X. A Pulse Asia survey released this year found that 75 percent of Filipinos get news from Facebook. Television was cited by 64 percent, YouTube by 38 percent, radio by 27 percent and TikTok by 11 percent. Newspapers registered a pitiful 3 percent.

Those two numbers — Facebook 75 percent, newspapers 3 percent — encapsulate the biggest revolution in Philippine mass communications since television arrived. They would seem to announce the death of the newspaper columnist like myself; I think the opposite may be happening: the newspaper is shrinking, but the columnist has escaped from it.

For most of Philippine journalism’s history, an opinion writer’s influence was inseparable from his newspaper. A columnist in a paper selling 100,000 copies could theoretically reach those 100,000 buyers, though only a fraction actually turned to his column. The newspaper controlled the printing press, the distribution network and, most importantly, access to readers.

Social media has shattered that relationship. Today I can write a column for The Manila Times, have it published in print and online, then post it on my two Facebook accounts (Rigoberto Tiglao and Bobi Tiglao), which together have 208,000 followers and X (@bobitiglao), with 41,000.

A reader shares it with his friends, some of those friends share it again, other pages quote it, a passage is reproduced as a screenshot, somebody attacks it on X and somebody else discusses it on YouTube or TikTok. A person who has never bought a copy of the newspaper can read the column, argue about it and send it to 50 friends.

The column has escaped the newspaper, and a columnist’s influence can no longer be measured by his newspaper’s circulation. He can conceivably reach more people through social media than through print — one of the great paradoxes of the digital revolution: it has devastated the newspaper business even as it hands individual writers a distribution system more powerful than anything their predecessors possessed.

Reversal

This is a fundamental reversal of power within journalism. In the old system, readers bought a newspaper and encountered its columnists inside it — you bought The Manila Times, Philstar or Inquirer, then chose among the writers on its opinion pages. Today many readers do the reverse: they follow people.

A Filipino follows a columnist on Facebook, and when that writer publishes something new, it appears in his feed — he may not even notice which newspaper originally ran it. Loyalty has shifted, from publication to personality, and the columnist himself becomes a media brand.

This is why Facebook follower counts, imperfect as they are, have become real indicators of influence. A columnist with thousands of followers possesses his own distribution network, something an earlier generation of writers couldn’t have imagined. His reach extends further still, because Facebook can recommend posts to people who don’t follow him at all — a column shared repeatedly can travel far outside the writer’s established audience, read by hundreds of thousands through shares, screenshots and cross-platform discussion, though only tens of thousands actually saw it in the newspaper itself. There is no longer a physical ceiling set by how many copies come off the press.

Columnists deserve particular attention in this new media world because social media is extraordinarily well suited to opinion. A straight news report answers a fairly simple question — what happened? A columnist addresses the question social media users often care about more: What does it mean, and whom should I blame or believe?

Engagement

Opinion generates agreement and disagreement, and both generate engagement. Agreement produces likes and shares; disagreement produces comments and counter-posts; outrage generates still more. A provocative argument can acquire a second life on Facebook that a routine news report never gets.

Ironically, people who violently disagree with a columnist even widens his reach by attacking him — quoting him, screenshotting his argument, sharing the column with “Look at what this man is saying.” They mean to condemn him but end up distributing him instead. It’s a phenomenon that would have bewildered an old newspaper publisher: your enemies can help enlarge your readership.

This new power comes with a danger. Facebook doesn’t show every follower every post. Its recommendation systems learn what users engage with and predict what they’re likely to find interesting.

Suppose I am intensely anti-Marcos. I read an anti-Marcos column to the end, “like” it, share another and follow several writers hostile to the administration. I have taught the algorithm something about myself — it doesn’t need to understand why I oppose Marcos, only that when it feeds me anti-Marcos material, I engage, so it supplies more.

Reverse the politics and the mechanism works the same way. A Marcos supporter increasingly encounters columnists favorable to Marcos; a Duterte partisan is shown pro-Duterte writers; an anti-Duterte reader, the opposite set of commentators. The algorithm — a computerized set of rules and calculations that decides what content each user sees — doesn’t merely select which news we see. It increasingly selects which opinions explain that news to us.

Algorithm

That expands and makes the columnist’s readers, he is no longer simply waiting on an opinion page for readers to find him. The algorithm brings him to the reader, including readers who have never bought the newspaper nor opened its Facebook account or its website his column appears in.

The consequence is profound. Two Filipinos living next door to each other can open Facebook at exactly the same moment and see radically different pictures of their country. One sees columns attacking Marcos, videos alleging corruption, posts ridiculing the administration; the other sees infrastructure projects, investment announcements, columns defending the president and attacks against his opponents. Each thinks the facts overwhelmingly support his position and wonders how the other can possibly be so ignorant. The explanation may be simple: They have been shown different faces of the Philippines.

This is sometimes called the “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” effect, though it shouldn’t be exaggerated — research indicates social media users still encounter contrary views, and changing algorithms doesn’t necessarily transform people’s fundamental beliefs. The algorithm doesn’t manufacture our politics from nothing, but it discovers our preferences, feeds them and reinforces them.

Columnists are important participants in that feedback loop. Readers choose writers who articulate what they already suspect; the algorithm observes the preference and supplies more from those writers; columnists in turn see immediately which arguments generate thousands of reactions. The algorithm learns the reader, while the columnist learns his audience.

Today’s columnist operates in several worlds at once: the newspaper gives him institutional credibility, Facebook gives him mass distribution, X injects him into elite political discussion, and YouTube and TikTok convert his arguments into video. No columnist of the pre-internet era possessed all these channels together.

Boundary

None of this makes newspapers irrelevant. They still employ reporters, maintain newsrooms, investigate stories and provide the institutional platform from which many columnists derive credibility. But their role is changing — for a successful opinion writer, the newspaper may increasingly be less the boundary of his audience than the launch pad for his argument.

Twenty-five years ago, a newspaper’s circulation falling by half would reasonably suggest its columnists’ influence had also declined. Today that conclusion may be entirely wrong: A newspaper can lose print readers while one of its columnists simultaneously gains hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers. The institution contracts while the writer expands, and the columnist may eventually command a larger identifiable audience than the newspaper itself.

Something fundamental has changed. The printing press once gave the publisher enormous power over the writer; social media has given part of that power back to the writer.There is a dark side to this liberation, though. Social media rewards engagement, not accuracy, nuance or wisdom. A well-researched 1,200 word analysis may travel less widely than an outrageous accusation in three sentences. Columnists face the same temptation as vloggers and politicians: write what generates reactions.

Social media therefore both liberates the columnist from the newspaper and threatens to imprison him inside his audience’s prejudices. That may be the central paradox of opinion journalism in the Facebook age.

Who controls the Filipino mind? For most of the 20th century, Philippine newspapers, radio and television did. That system has fragmented. Professional journalists still produce much of the original reporting, but Facebook, YouTube and X increasingly distribute it, especially the opinions of columnists who have fast adapted to this new media world.

The Philippines is hardly unique. American media are undergoing essentially the same transformation, although traditional news organizations remain stronger there than Philippine newspapers are here. Pew Research Center reported in 2025 that 38 percent regularly get news from Facebook, 35 percent from YouTube, 20 percent each from TikTok and Instagram, and 12 percent from X. The 2026 Reuters Institute report describes the broader global trend: Social media and video platforms have now overtaken news organizations’ own websites as the most widely used route to online news across its 48 markets. In the United States, YouTube has become so important that it competes for television viewing time not only with traditional cable news companies but with streaming services.

In contrast to the Philippine situation, there has been America’s rapid rise of the individual news personality — podcasts. Pew found that 21 percent of American adults regularly get news from social media news influencers, rising to 38 percent among those aged 18 to 29. The old American hierarchy — New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBS — increasingly competes with podcasters, YouTubers, Substack writers and individual commentators whose audiences may dwarf those of newspaper columnists of an earlier era.

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Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post How Filipinos get their news today first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

How Filipinos get their news today
Source: Breaking News PH