The wit and wisdom of newsroom legend Jimmy Gil
I was writing a book about the news team I joined when I walked in for an interview and never left until 33 years later. The date was June 10, 1983.
The idea behind the vanity project was to honor the men and women (nay, "legends" sounds more like it) I had the great privilege of working alongside with. And when I heard from his daughter that he was in a bad way, I studiously put my nose to the grindstone intent on making a gift of it to him on his 79th birthday.
I fell terribly behind my own deadline despite my best intentions because it was so hard to get the original cast's personal information and it took time to find relatives and acquaintances of theirs on social media and the ether.
The OG reporters: Jun Bautista, Tony Lozano, Rey Vidal, Jimmy Gil, Pert Franco, and Jackie David.
I was supposed to have the book's prototype ready by June 6. That deadline came and passed 5 days ago. And at 9:35 on the morning of June 11, 2026, with around three-to-five more chapters for me to go, Jimmy Gil left for the great big newsroom in the sky.
I clutched at the pages of manuscript and began the heartbreaking task of writing a brief biographical sketch of the man to help my former news colleagues tell the world of his passing: Jaime Federico Perez Gil shared a birthday with my daughter. It's a good thing neither of them was born at six in the morning or at night else the Catholic World will be thrown into a sudden state of intense fear. 666 ba naman.
Anyhoo, he was among the first people I met when then news director Antonio D. Seva introduced me around. At the time, he was doing pretty much what he did for the next thirty or so years we worked together: Cover the Western Police District, the NBI, Manila City Hall, the Labor Department—practically anything newsworthy that breaks out in the City of Manila—be it a transport strike, a rally, a fire, a kapihan or discussion forum and, if he's lucky, even a presentation of beauty pageant candidates at the poolside of an area hotel.
At a time when the internet was not yet the accessible and user-friendly tool it is today, reporters had to rely solely on shoe-leather journalism to start their day. They monitored the radio, called up their sources, scoured the newspapers, did the deep dive in coming up with the required daily haul of four to five stories.
Jimmy would disappear with one or two broadsheets every morning and call out "Nasa meeting lang ako!" as he headed out the door. It would take clueless me a few days to figure out that that meant him reading the papers end to end while doing his "morning ablutions" in the men's comfort room pala!
Weekend mornings usually found us in the sports club of the news director's apartment complex, having a barbecue, and meeting the lean and mean news team's children. We were family like that. Or cheering the ragtag news basketball team at an inter-network competition that more often than not ended in petty brawls or fisticuffs. I think the only games they ever won were the ones they won by default! At least us newsroom girls got to be the team's muse alternately haha.
But it was a kinder world in which we practiced the craft, although still very much in the shadow of government censorship despite martial law ostensibly being lifted in 1981. Jimmy studied commerce in FEU but you could say his career path steadily inched him closer first to radio then television. While in college, he accompanied a friend to the Ramada who was applying for a job as a DJ. He landed the gig instead.
Similar stints preceded or followed in DZRJ, DZHP (The Sound of the City) until the yellow brick road led him to DZBB as a newswriter in 1979 and from there to the TV newsroom in 1982. We worked more closely when I became one of two desk editors in 1988 and would bark terse instructions to them in the field about latebreakers using "handles" on the two-way while I directed the team closest to the site, to take the developing story.
His handle was "Gemini" and I was "Aquarius" but there were times when I would be addressed as "Paa" (on account of my size 8 stompers) or "Tarhata" because of course I was the resident promdi from Zamboanga. That was his mischievous side talking, but this is also the astute colleague who asked the late Corazon Aquino in 1985 what it would take to make her run for president against Ferdinand Marcos.
Mrs. Aquino's response: Marcos had to call for a snap election, and the opposition had to gather one million signatures to officially draft her. GMA News ran that interview at the risk of getting the call from Malacañang to pull it from the lineup of the later newscast. Had the news not done so and were it not for that question, would democracy have prospered as it did?
Who knew Jimmy Gil's yellow brick road would lead to this? Better than "Emerald City". This made history.