From a Simple Goal to a Global Mission

A Simple Goal, A Lofty Mission

By Val G. Abelgas, Founding President

In early October 2023, four local journalists met at the IHOP restaurant in Cerritos to discuss the possibility of organizing a media group in Southern California. The immediate goal was simple enough. At that time, the Philippine Department of Tourism was planning to invite a group of US-based journalists to a media tour of Philippine tourism destinations.

The group was led by Manny Ilagan, a former regional director of the DOT in Los Angeles (PDOTLA) and a regular travel writer for the Philippine Post. He was asked by then Tourism Secretary Cristina Garcia Frasco to invite some California-based journalists for the media tour. The secretary told him to make sure the group would be composed of legitimate writers as they were expected to write about their travel experience in the Philippines.

Manny called journalists Lydia V. Solis, chief Los Angeles correspondent of Philippine News; Nimfa U. Rueda, then LA correspondent of Inquirer.net; and myself, Val G. Abelgas, a veteran Manila editor and publisher and editor-in-chief of the Philippine Post, to a lunch-meeting at the Cerritos restaurant to discuss the possibility of organizing a new media group in Southern California.

Less than two weeks later, the four of us were meeting with a few LA-based journalists at Manny's residence in the city of Stanton in Orange County. I suggested we don't use the word press club as there have been so many press clubs in Southern California and that perhaps we could use the phrase "media group" instead, so it would be less formal.

The talks later evolved into the possibility of expanding the group to include other Filipino journalists from other cities in the cities, very much like the Federation of Filipino American Media Associations (FFAMAS) that I helped found in November 1993 during the first National Convention of Filipino Editors in America that I organized with then press attache Roy Gorre with the then visiting Philippine President Fidel V. Ramos as guest speaker at the LA Sports Arena in Inglewood.

A simple goal of joining a Philippine media tour and suddenly turning it into a lofty mission of bringing together Filipino journalists from all over the world, helping them adjust to a fast-evolving digital media world, improve their craft, meeting the information needs of the Global Filipino Diaspora, and preparing the young generation of Filipinos to take over this lofty mission in the near future. The group's own evolution happened in just the initial meeting over sumptuous merienda prepared by Bobby and Loida Crisostomo, and Manny's wife Meg Ilagan.

And so, the Philippine Global Media Group (PGMG) was born.