The year 2017 was a memorable one for us at ACFJ.
It was our first full year at our new office at Room 318 of the CTC building at the Ateneo, a space awash in natural light and filled with the sights and sounds of the academe. We have come to mark the hours by silent corridors that suddenly burst with the din of students rushing to and from classes as the bell rings.
A series of activities made 2017 a year to remember. The “Campus Journalism Challenge” in June brought young writers from various schools to the Ateneo to listen to industry veterans like Ed Lingao, Inday Espina Varona, and Arlene Burgos to discuss, among others, the topic that has become a buzzword: fake news. It was also the topic of a forum in October that featured Canadian journalism professor Kim Kierans who teaches both at the Ateneo and at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Ateneo alumna Avigail Olarte who is an editor at CNN Philippines and contributing writer at VERA Files.
In September, ACFJ had “Covering Marawi” and we listened to journalists Chiara Zambrano, Jam Alindogan and Jez Aznar talk about the challenges of doing fieldwork in a place where journalists had little access to information.
As the year drew to a close, we had the annual Pitik forum. Photojournalist Rick Rocamora talked about his work in California where he is based as well as the stories he covers in Manila which he vists every year.
Throughout 2017, we worked to reinvent our website. We want it to be a platform on which could tell the world what is happening at ACFJ and present the best that the center has to offer, including the work of Asian journalists who are alumni of the Ateneo’s M.A. Journalism program, the Diplomas in Photojournalism, Multimedia Journalism and Visual Journalism.
We hope to fill this space with stories, photographs and videos produced by journalists who, in their time here at the Ateneo, strove to become the best that they can be, and are now serving as the bridge from the academe to the world of journalism.
Welcome to the new ACFJ website, our new home on the internet!
