A little goes a long way

Entrepreneur Magazine, March 2012

An article by Lolita Villa of Entrepreneur Magazine Philippines about Sinag Printing winning the Natasa Prize 2011 in Vienna, Austria.

Not all CSR programs cost an arm and a leg. Take it from this small printng press in Laguna.

A small business south of Manila owned by a young couple recently proved that you can undertake a CSR (Corporate Social Resposibility) program for under P50,000 – and even win an international award in the process.

                In 2007, Ruel Landicho, 34, and his wife Raia Dela Peña-Landicho, 32, started Sinag Publishing and Printing Services, a Calamba, Laguna – based printing company that specializes in school yearbooks and marketing collaterals.

                Sinag is actually an offshoot of Tambuli Publishing, started by Raia’s father and known for printing community newspapers since the 1970s. Though growing and successful, Sinag is still a small outfit run by less than 15 people, using an old Heidelberg offset press manufactured a hundred years ago.

                Which is why the unassuming Landichos, who started Sinag on a whim, were surprised when the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers or WAN-IFRA, awarded them the first Natasa Prize for Printing Plants in the 2011 World Young Reader Awards for running a series of successful programs that benefited young journalists in the greater Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon provinces) area.

How did they do it?

Aiming to “foster a love for writing and journalism in the youth of our province”, the Landichos launched their first ever Sinag Journalism Training (SJT) seminar at Calamba’s Central 1 Elementary School in October 2008.

                Raia, a Comparative Literature Major at the University of the Philippines –Diliman, tapped her former schoolmates as speakers for the event. The couple also approached the local Department of Education office to have them sponsor the venue and open the event to both public and private institutions. Local government officials responded to their solicitations by providing food and announcement banners for the event. The result: about 1,000 young students attended the seminar.

                Since then, the couple has organized two more seminars, both of them sponsored and offered to the students for free.

At what cost?

The Landichos spent less than P30,000.00 for all three seminars by tapping the resources of like-minded organizations. Raia, a great fan of social networking sites, admits that Sinag does not even have its own website (although they are currently working on one), but uses Facebook, Multiply, Sulit, Blogspot and other free sites to promote the business and the seminars.

                These sites were how Wan-Ifra executive director Dr. Aralynn McMane discovered them. McMane saw Sinag as the one that embodied the spirit of the Natasa Award the best. She contacted the Landichos, who then flew to Vienna, Austria to attend the 63^rd World Newspaper Congress in October last year, to receive the recognition.

                The Landichos get emotional when asked about this achievemnt – they have never dreamed that their experimental attempts at business and CSR would let them reap an international recognition. Raia says: “We are just a small company. But this has not deterred us from dreaming to do great things for the Community.”

What is the Natasa Prize?

The Natasa Prize for Printing Plants category of the World Young reader Awards goes to a newspaper printing plant “that has an effective educational programme to teach the young about newspaper journalism and about the importance and fragility of a free press,” according to the WAN-IFRA website (www.wan-ifra.org)

                The prize was named after the late Nataza Vuckovic Lesendric who, in partnership with WAN-IFRA and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), founded and ran a distribution system and then a printing plant for the independent press of Siberia under the repressive regime of longtime president Slobodan Milosevic.

Sinag Journalism Training Seminar Program

SINAG PUBLISHING AND PRINTING SERVICES
JOURNALISM TRAINING SEMINAR PROGRAM


INTRODUCTION

Sinag Publishing and Printing Services is an enterprise that has pledged a vocation to community service and learning. The launching of Journalism Training Seminars with our partner schools is our way of showing our clients that Sinag goes the extra mile when it comes to our services. We aim to show our partner-schools that Sinag is not always just business but business with a consciousness of community service.

HISTORY OF SNAG PUBLISHING AND PRINTING SERVICES

Sinag Publishing and Printing first started its business as a provincial newspaper named Sinag ng Laguna Newsweekly in 2004. Envisioned as a local newspaper focusing on entrepreneurship and the local business community’s activities, Sinag ng Laguna has expanded its scope to commercial printing as a way of further enhancing the services it provides to the local business community.

We share our printing plant with our sister company Tambuli Press, one of the oldest printing plants in Laguna. Tambuli Press is the publisher of Tambuling Batangas Newsweekly and Ang Caviteno Newsweekly, both provincial community newspapers that have served the CALABARZON area for more than thirty years.

Our company’s long history of publishing newspapers gives us the edge in terms of printing newspapers and newsletters for schools and other institutions. And although Sinag has expanded to commercial printing, we continue to do community service by giving free seminars to public and private educational institutions. For private learning institutions, we currently offer our Journalism Training Seminar programs as additional benefit for schools that avail of our printing services.


BENEFITS OF THE JOURNALISM TRAINING SEMINAR
BY SINAG PUBLISHING AND PRINTING SERVICES


Learning institutions with school organs regularly conduct in-house or internal training seminars for their staffers as part of their program for developing the skills of their student writers, one obvious benefit of having an external training partner like us is that we assist the teacher/instructors in charge of the school organs in planning and formulating their training programs. We help enrich their training program.

A training seminar from us differs from standard in-house or internal journalism training seminars because we help provide the perspective of actual journalists who have knowledge of current industry practices.

We believe that standard lectures will benefit greatly from training workshops that focus on praxis and output, that’s why our training program is workshop-centered and each workshop strives toward an actual output from the students.

Being a publisher and printer of provincial newspapers, we also provide background information to student/writers and student/editors of the printing process that leads to the newspaper as a finished product. We believe that giving students an understanding of the whole process of producing a newspaper, from editorial planning up to the actual printing of the newspaper will enrich their experience of being staffers of their student paper. In connection with this, we also offer educational trips/visits to our design studio and printing plant for our student-beneficiaries as part of the enrichment program in our training seminars.

BE OUR PARTNER NOW!

If you are interested in availing of our packaged print plus training program, please don’t hesitate to contact and coordinate with us. We offer our training seminars to existing clients as well as new or potential clients as a value-added benefit of our printing services. Thru this additional benefit we want to show our clients that we go the extra mile when it comes to our services. So be our partner now and get a chance to experience our brand of customer care.

PICTURE GALLERY: 1ST SINAG JOURNALISM TRAINING SEMINAR, JOAQUIN CHIPECO HALL, CALAMBA CITY, LAGUNA, 18 OCTOBER 2008.


OPENING CEREMONIES OF THE SINAG JTS

THE SINAG PRINTING PRESS BOOTH WITH OUR INSTRUCTORS PREPARING FOR THE SEMINAR

SOME OF THE PARTICIPANTS OF THE SEMINAR PREPARING FOR THEIR WORKSHOP

A BUS LOAD OF STUDENTS PARTICIPATING IN THE SEMINAR

THE WELCOME SPEECH OF SINAG OWNER, RAIA DELA PENA

Over a thousand students came to our training event from Calamba City both from public and private institutions from grade level, high school and college students!