JournalIXM by IXM Hakuhodo has a new Editor-in-Chief. In his first editorial note, he talks about beginnings, and how paths reveal themselves as we keep walking forward.

Around mid-May of 2022, Third Domingo, IXM Hakuhodo co-founder and Creative-at-Large, came to me with an idea. I was bunking at a friend’s apartment in Katipunan, getting ready to head back to my family in Cagayan de Oro, thinking about my future and packing up a broken heart from another devastating loss in the elections.

Over a half-bottle of Jameson in that dimly-lit apartment, Third laid it out: A publication that could be both a playground for the IXM Hakuhodo creatives and a platform for thought leadership; a center of gravity for an industry that had few enough spaces for discourse outside of the usual conferences. What if, he said, we could start it, populate it with pieces that had depth and insight, that were fun, that pushed forward debates, that made people think twice about where the industry was headed. What if.

But things, other things, happened. I spent a year licking my wounds, writing poetry, going through a pipeline of book projects that had been stalled for years, attending a fellowship, being a father. Third got things moving, set things up, but (I suspect) was overtaken by the many other tasks needed to keep the IXM Hakuhodo engine running full throttle.

And so the project chugged along, until around October of last year, when a phone call that started, “I’m still in if you still want to do this,” prompted a much longer conversation– a conversation which I will probably touch on over what will hopefully be a long tenure as JournalIXM’s Editor-in-Chief.

At this point, let’s call this publication “an evolving sketch,” a croquis, if you may, with lines and edges to be filled in as we go along. A few things are clear, though: The mission remains the same. IXM Hakuhodo has an army of creatives, all of them talented, all of them with something to say. We’ll be tapping friends from within our network– literary types, artists and academics, historians, thinkers, researchers– to talk about creativity and the creative industry. We won’t be doing news or reportage, but rather asking questions about why things matter, and attempting to answer them. We’ll take up space with purpose, with relevance.

From hereon out, we’ll be dropping three articles a week, with volume increasing as we gain momentum. For now, you’ll be seeing it on our IXM Facebook page– meaning its intent will primarily be for internal communications. No one’s stopping us from sharing it with our own networks, of course, especially if we have something meaningful to say. I’m confident this will always be the case.

In true IXM Hakuhodo fashion, we’re putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that a path will always reveal itself. Consider this another beginning. 

Mikael de Lara Co is the new Editor-in-Chief of JournalIXM by IXM Hakuhodo, and concurrently serves as Head of Copy for the agency. His books of poetry and translations have been named finalist for the National Book Award four times. He has won the Palancas five times and the Maningning Miclat Award for poetry twice. He worked in advocacy and strategic political communications before joining IXM Hakuhodo.