By Mortz C. Ortigoza
DAGUPAN CITY -- Reports that reach this writer say that Sunday Punch will cease circulation for the four cities and forty-four towns’ Pangasinan after one last issue to be printed this week.
The English provincial newspaper has been the perennial leading community weekly in the gargantuan province. It was founded in July 1956 by Ermin Erfe Garcia, Sr. in this second class city until online publications – that could post news stories as they unfold -- gave it a run of its money.
The stubbornness of the Punch to
close shop earlier saw countless Pangasinan weeklies to fall out of business
behind it due to plummeting print advertising revenues and changing consumer
habits, as readers and advertisers migrate to digital and social media
platforms mostly written in Filipino -- that jibe to the poor comprehension of the Filipinos in the English language.
Increasing costs for paper, printing, and distribution, paired with widespread news avoidance, make traditional publishing financially unsustainable.
They have been the clamor of the more than a dozen
remaining community newspaper publishers that still earn revenues as registered
members of the various courts and legislative bodies of local governments all
over Pangasinan to publish Ordinances, Resolutions, Deeds of Extra Judicial
Settlement, Adjudication of the Estate of Deceased Person, and Settlement of
Partition, and Sale, Adoption, and others.
“Most
of the surviving weekly newspapers in Pangasinan are owned by printing shop
entrepreneurs whose comparative advantage is the reduced cost of production unlike
what the soon to be defunct Sunday Punch, Guardian, and countless weeklies who
did not have their own printing press,” a source who is privy on the
nuances of newspapering told Northern
Watch Newspaper.
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