In the beginning, there was the "paperless" TarlacNews. Established on April 15, 1999, it made waves in the World Wide Web, pioneering online news providing to Tarlaqueños around the world, while at the same time, exerting efforts to bring together all natives of Tarlac into one virtual global community.

Despite the dearth of resources, TarlacNews (which evolved from many names, such as Tarlac News Center, tarlacnews * the Tarlaqueño global community, into the present TarlacNews in a period of three years) struggled to fulfill the basic duties of a media organization — to inform, to educate and to entertain.

But since the staffers who have evolved to compose the present TarlacNews have a penchant for advocacy on pressing socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural issues that affect the Tarlaqueño community, this media organization took on a fourth basic duty — to empower its readers wherever they may be in the world. This is what we proudly call "journalism advocacy."

We admit that we have had several shortcomings in pursuing our advocacies on raging controversies that primarily affected the people. Nonetheless, we persevered in trying to rectify these, and look back to our experiences in order to learn vital lessons that would be our weapons in continuously bannering the very foundations of our advocacies, which are, to uphold the freedom of the press and the people’s right to know.

With our advocacy on issues based on press freedom and the people’s right to information, we therefore have a basic objective: to ferret out the truth on a burning controversy that affects the people, no matter what, no matter how.

But in the course of pursuing our advocacy on people’s issues, we faced several pressures, formidable political ones at that, particularly on our vehement stand against the construction of a vast landfill facility in Kalangitan, Capas, and raising reasonable questions on the impropriety of Tarlac City Mayor Genaro Mendoza expediently releasing P250,000 in taxpayers’ money so that some 500 City Hall employees could develop "camaraderie" while having an "office outing or excursion" in an expensive beach in Subic.

When the pressures escalated, there came a time when the last straw was broken… and we sought more freedom in exercising press freedom and informing the people… and this gave birth to the weekly print edition of TarlacNews.

A product of a collective decision, TarlacNews, both in print and in the Internet, is proud to have evolved into a unique community media organization distinct from the others.

Unlike others, it has no sole owner; it is collectively owned by its staffers, which is why it is in the process of being registered as a cooperative. As such, it could genuinely claim that it could fully perform the duties of informing, educating, entertaining and empowering the reading public, both in Tarlac and in cyberspace.

The birth of the weekly print edition of TarlacNews is, moreover, just part of the continuing service hatched three years ago in the World Wide Web.

Therefore, as TarlacNews at http://tarlacnews.netfirms.com is not only your online newspaper, but your online global community as well, we declare that TarlacNews the weekly print edition is your community newspaper.