Goodbye 2024, hello 2025

Retirement came early in January last year, marking my exit as a business editor and my rebirth as a business columnist.

- Marianne Go

A full circle in journalism from desk work when I first joined in 1981 the afternoon broadsheet newspaper Evening Post of four-time Palanca awardee Kerima Polotan-Tuvera and Juan "Johnny" Tuvera, then executive secretary of former president Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

I basically started as a story-taker, manually typing out the stories filed by field reporters and giving the typed copy to the desk editors led by Cesar Amigo and Ramon Fernandez. I found the job numbing literally and physically as it required me to cradle the now-obsolete rotary dial phone and pound away at an old and clunky manual typewriter that used an ink ribbon that would occasionally unspool and which needed to be manually rotated, resulting in smudgy ink getting all over one's finger and whose typebars would likewise jam and which needed to be pulled back, similarly smudging one's fingers with ink from the typewriter ribbon.

I soon outgrew the entry-level, non-writing desk job and got transferred to the lifestyle/entertainment section, a position I initially found interesting -- getting to write lifestyle stories and features, and likewise attending entertainment events. However, it was not the kind of journalism I really wanted to pursue (although now I realize it would have been the most laidback part of my journalism career had I followed that path).