www.nordis.net

In September 1989, with the Cordillera Resource Center, the Northern Information Network gave birth to the Northern Dispatch or Nordis, accompanied with a letter to the editors of mainstream newspapers and wires. Its editor-in-chief, Cooper Resabal, wrote, “This is our maiden issue, a weekly packet of news and features on Northern Luzon. Initially, the coverage will be on the Cordillera and later on the Ilocandia and eventually the Cagayan Valley.”

The people behind this maiden issue said, “We are a group of community-based writers who feel the need to strengthen coverage of regional and provincial news and issues….”

The alternative press practitioners dispatched this packet of news regularly every week for the years that followed and diligently built a following at home and across the seas, of contributors and readers until it necessarily metamorphosed into the Northern Dispatch Weekly newspaper in October 2002.

Taking-up what the Cordillera Resource Center (CRC) and the Northern Media Information Network (NMIN) that formally launched the maiden issue of the Northern Dispatch Weekly. Editor-in-chief, Pio Verzola, Jr., its staff and network of writers and contributors drew inspiration from the “mosquito press” of the 1880s and the dark years of martial law. They defined their assertion of the freedom of expression in the realm of the alternative press, their brand of grassroots journalism where they remain “objective as it presents factual, accurate and actual events”. They made it a clear choice to “highlight the otherside of the story that are often missed or actively repressed (suppressed) by the ruling elite as it strives to expose the lies and deceit of the ruling class to the people and mainstream media.”

This is the legacy of Nordis for its existence as it already entered the second year for its third decade – as a community paper. # nordis.net