There’s probably no other broadsheet that carries with dignity, even pride, the corporate mantra, “Without Fear, Without Favor.” As DAILY TRIBUNE celebrates its silver milestone marking its 9,125th issue by 30 June and 1 July 2025, new challenges are seen on the historico-temporal horizon.
As always, DAILY TRIBUNE keeps itself abreast of the fast pace of events and developments in the national, regional, and global scenes as they happen where they do — corroborating every effort to publish “breaking news” in real time.
How can a lean staff commit all their time, talent, hearts, and minds to ensure that a newspaper comes out daily to be read by people from all walks of life? Now a quarter-century old, DAILY TRIBUNE is shifting gears to “maximum overdrive” not just in traditional print but more so on modernizing social media platforms across a broad range of communication modalities and trends.
It has found its niche in the news world, its role in nation building, its critical position to communicate public ideas from fact-checked, evidence-based primary information and data sources. Truly, it has accomplished pioneering work with its share of a surging readership, its modest awards, and its growing reputation in the communications industry.
The columnists who are part of this national newspaper promote and uphold the corporate goals it set out to pursue — five to 10 years hence — as its corporate raison d’etre. As with any media outfit worth its salt, there are constant challenges to the reporters, writers, editors, and columnists who put all the pieces together for an issue. This is the inherent possibility of being slapped with libel or cyber libel suits, of fear or intimidation, or other legal action.
There have been such charges lodged against the paper in its 25 years of existence largely because the “medium is the message” — no trimmings, no beating around the bush, no begging the question, no being more popish than the Pope. With a range of topics across multiple themes and sub-themes written about in editorials, in op-ed columns, as well as headline stories, sometimes Plain View believes the flip side of DAILY TRIBUNE is “Daily Tribute,” pardon the romanticism.
Don’t editors and columnists effectively communicate their ideas and worldviews with candor, humor, sarcasm, and vitriol precisely because some of them could stand from commanding heights, from their disciplinary perspectives, from the guiding criterion of objectivity? If a year has 52 weeks, a columnist who writes weekly would have generated at least a small fraction of the grand 1,300-column output over a 25-year spread.
Plain View made its debut on 23 May 2022 and, as they say, the rest is history. Since then to this day, no week has been complete without a syntopical essay drawn up. Lest writers in general and columnists in particular be regarded as iconoclasts or individuals who make others hot under the collar, it is probably an unfair accord. Accuracy of information delivered on time and over a broad range of contents and contexts are its primordial currency.
We have a vibrant communications ecosystem and a digital technology that is developing at a hypersonic pace. Both are in lockstep with each other so a very large universe of interconnectivity between and among a constellation of readers, thought leaders, artists, academics, social critics, commentators, media professionals, journalists inhabit this intellectual landscape and wired globosphere.
A paper should engage with all its readers on current events, societal issues, and multiple sectoral concerns that impact their lives and that inform public policy toward the goal — salus populi suprema lex esto — the welfare of the people should be the supreme law.
To end, let me quote Thomas Jefferson who said: “Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Indeed, we at DAILY TRIBUNE produce the raw material of history because it is the story of our times — a free press for a free people.