Some time when I was in elementary school, some really old newspapers popped up at the faculty room. Like, I think they were ten years old, or maybe older - I can't honestly remember which year it happened.

They were newspapers from 1986 - specifically, from that week in February 1986. They were newspapers published during the fateful days of the EDSA Revolution.

I guess one of the teachers decided to bring it over for class or something. I didn't know, and at the time, I didn't care. All I know was, I suddenly have access to newspapers from before I was born. Sure, they were published during a momentous point in the calendar, but really, these were ultimately newspapers from before I was born. I was already a bit of a newspaper geek back then. I've already seen some newspapers from other parts of the world, but those were contemporaneous, so seeing ones from 1986 were quite a thrill.

Okay, so maybe those newspapers were twelve or thirteen years old. I had my first foreign newspaper - from an aunt who was visiting from Atlanta - in 1998. I don't know why I still remember that. But I digress.

My fascination meant the historical value of the articles written there weren't that important to me. All I wanted to see was what those newspapers from 1986 looked like. This being the time when pages were laid out manually - literally why we "cut" and "paste" things on the computer now - things looked messy and, frankly, boring. Like, big photographs weren't really a thing, although the revolution meant they had to run a good amount of photos. But those photographs weren't in color. The only color I remember seeing across all the newspapers was blue, which appeared on the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer issue dated 26 February 1986. Yep, that one, the one that goes "It's all over; Marcos flees!"

What I also distinctly remember is the newspaper being just sixteen pages in total. That Inquirer issue had sixteen pages. An issue of The Manila Times released on the same date also had sixteen pages. (It looked much cleaner, though.) It was fascinating to me considering newspapers thirteen years later (again, I think) had thrice as many pages. A lot of ads, inevitably. Also a lot more sections. There wasn't the thing we called "lifestyle" back then, but they did bother with television schedules and movie listings.

Now with twenty years' worth of hindsight and understanding, I know that it was because the economy was such in tatters in 1986. Our gross domestic product was plumbing new depths as our creditors came knocking at our door, demanding we pay up. But then, I don't really know much else, outside of the stories constantly retold, and definitely distorted since, about how life was at the time.

I remembered all this when I bought another copy of the Inquirer - a newer one, of course - a couple of weeks ago. It's 2022, and they say print is dead, and if you want any proof, it's in this sixteen-page newspaper. But there's still the lifestyle section. It's Thursday, so it's food.

Today's is barely meatier. Twenty pages, still divided across three sections, two of which only have four pages. Granted, it's elections, so there are slightly more ads - there's one full-page ad showing their support for a doomed candidate. There's also the news of the day, but it barely gets a mention on the front page. (It's at the bottom of page two.) Inevitably, as the Inquirer was forged by the events of February 1986, it gives a much bigger play to the 36th anniversary of an event that no longer means anything to younger generations outside of a day off.

Why our newspapers of record refuse to shift to tabloid size - outside of what the size connotes - eludes me. I mean, it isn't a problem in the UK, and it isn't a problem in Malaysia. Yes, I'm still a newspaper geek, and I get excited about these things, still. But then, who still reads newspapers, right? Why would you, if you can get your news for free online? And so many sources out there! There's bound to be one for your particular brand of political-belief-as-personality-trait. And besides, those journalists don't do their jobs well anyway, right? Why should I give them the money to get it right? And anyway, it won't matter at all by July. Let them languish, you might say.