IT was sheer serendipity that on the day BusinessMirror released its anniversary folio marking its 17th anniversary, a 108-year-old maritime icon from Norway would sail into Manila’s port as part of a global navigation. The men and women behind BusinessMirror had decided, early on, to use a sailboat—fittingly floating in an ocean of face masks—to illustrate the rough waters in which it had navigated through the pandemic.
“Navigating@17: Continuing the Journey in a Pandemic World” is the theme for this year’s anniversary. It is to illustrate the paper’s sense of purpose, true grit, faith and hope in a world vastly disrupted, but where troubled waters still allow ships to keep sailing from shore to shore—because it’s the one thing worth doing for journalists whose main task is connecting people by letting them know what’s going on in each other’s corners of the planet.
And so, this anniversary month, 17 years since Antonio L. Cabangon Chua launched his own dream of a paper (boat) promising “A Broader Look at Today’s Business,” we mark the occasion with a prayer of thanks. And a hope that, like the Norwegian Statsraad Lehmkuhl, BusinessMirror will keep sailing for a hundred years more.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes