One of the early players in online journalism in the Philippines is sunstar.com.ph. It’s design needs some improvement, its content some refinement, but SunStar has become one of the first, if not the leading media organization in the country that embraced new media and experimented with the concept of convergence.
It started with Sun.Star Cebu, a community newspaper in the central Philippine province of Cebu. SunStar Cebu is the oldest of the chain of Sun.Star newspapers and has been publishing since 1982.
The paper’s success led its owners to open “franchises” around the country. It later evolved into a network of provincial/community papers, a network bigger than many other publications. In the late 1990s, it started a website that “converges” all its publications under one portal, then known as SunStar Exchange.
From just a provincial/community publication, SunStar became a website that covers areas not usually covered by bigger publications. It became a source of leads and information for many journalists. Then it started publishing photographs on its homepage, and lately video accompanying its stories.
SunStar may not have the resources available to publications like the Inquirer, Philippine Star, ABS-CBN or GMA News to sustain costly multimedia content, but this “provincial” publication has shown, in almost two decades now, that being big is not necessarily an ingredient for success.
The success of SunStar lies in its network of people around the country that make local stories available to an international audience. In recent years SunStar has shown that it can compete with bigger media outfits in terms of hits and page views with the convergence of resources on a platform that reaches out to a global audience.
With a better design, prominent use of its multimedia content and bigger photographs, this publication has a long way to go.
