Who let Ms. Kara Ortiga get away with an article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH? Everyone including me was expecting a feature article. Not an editorial or an opinion article about how the ALDUB Phenomenon revolved around a girl like Maine Mendoza. Like seriously. I’ve read tabloid articles way better than the article published on Esquire PH’s February 2016 issue. I had to read the article again to check what else did I miss. Also, as of this writing, Ms. Kara Ortiga has set her Twitter account to private.
Why all this ruckus when the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH is not the first article that critiqued ALDUB? Sure. It’s just Maine Mendoza and JOWAPAO (amalgam for Jose Manalo, Wally Bayola and Paolo Ballesteros) on the cover. But not even Alden Richards was spared from the spiteful prose that failed Ms. Ortiga failed to suppress in the article. Same bitterness is also evident the moment she wrote about the fans.
About fans of ALDUB and Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “Fans frantically wave their AlDub tarpaulins, hoping the cameraman decides to pan left.”
Bad choice of words right there. Early in the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH and there’s a slight shade to the fans. Can’t fans simply be enthusiastic because they are happy at the sight of Alden Richards as mentioned in the screengrab? It is unfair to generalize fan clubs as camera-grubbing individuals. And all the more unfair that you attributed that image to the AlDub fan club mentioned.
About Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “When Maine Mendoza arrives at our shoot, she is three hours late, …”
Why embolden these words? While the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH is not a PR stunt or an advertising feature, putting your subject on a bad light would immediately scoff off some readers. Some may still be unaware of who Maine Mendoza is at this time. What if it’s their first time to read about her and chanced upon your article with the second paragraph looking like this? Why bother mention it when the magazine cover does not show it? It seems as if you want to make her pay for the wasted 3 hours.
About Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “Her smile cannot hide exhaustion, and her face shows the most signs of it – eyes droopy, skin sagging in some places, the result of the wear and tear from early call times, overdone makeup, and late night wrap-ups.”
Ms. Ortiga really went the extra mile in describing Maine Mendoza’s appearance before the stylists managed to come up with her look. Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH revealed a stunning woman happy to be featured on a magazine again. A stark contrast to the woman Ms. Ortiga just described. If she is trying to make her owe her appearance on the magazine to the Esquire PH staff, they should have said so without mentioning specifics. The moment the phrase “overdone makeup” appeared on the article. I am immediately reminded of the days when Maine Mendoza would get bashed for not being pretty enough. That she only got pretty lately because of getting caked up. (I don’t need to name those tabloid writers.)
About Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “Maine could lip-sync, all right – but that was about all she could do.”
This is the part in the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH starts to really feel more like an opinion piece than a well-researched feature article. Ortiga made the effort to transcribe what little she knew of the audition interview that Ms. Jenny Ferre conducted for Maine Mendoza. Worse, she did not even interview Maine Mendoza herself. But more on that later since we see that Ms. Ortiga can’t even spell Wally Bayola’s name correctly. It’s BAYOLA, not BAYONA. He’s in the photoshoot. She should have at least made the courtesy to ask the man himself if she got his name right.
About Alden Richards on Esquire PH: “Alden Richards, a C-list actor who was still awaiting his break.”
C-list by whose parameters? Halfway through the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH and the sarcasm is already reverberating through the halls. Who measures celebrities today as A-list, B-list and C-list? If having 5 soaps – top-billing 3 of them all on primetime – is not enough to remove the snooty view on Alden Richards, what could? Better yet, what television network is Ms. Ortiga actually viewing before she first laid eyes on Alden Richards? If Ms. Ortiga just used the term “C-list” to declare her superiority over anyone that fawns on Aldub, bad move. More like bad choice of words. And we’re only halfway through the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH.
About ALDUB on Esquire PH: “As Anna Mangipol of YES! Magazine points out, think about it: have you ever heard of a love team who could dictate the storyboards of advertisers?”
“Dictate” is different from “adjust”. I may not know the level of adjustments that advertisers made to cater to the logistic demands of a love team like ALDUB. But it’s still not the same as “dictate”. And it’s a sign that this article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH is screaming/begging for attention with the kind of quotes that Ms. Ortiga highlighted. It seems as if she highlighted more of the bad ones because there isn’t anything good worth highlighting anyway. I now have to finish the article just to check anything worth salvaging.
About Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “I catch her wobbling.”
Apparently, the fault-finder in Ms. Ortiga is very much alive in the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH. She went further by writing “A stylist steps in to fix the creases on her clothes, and she holds on to his arms lightly, steadying herself to keep from being caught off-balance”. She obviously doesn’t trust in her subject enough to let her be in this pictorial-slash-photoshoot.
About Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH: “It’s sad that our only encounter is a short e-mail exchange.”
The most disturbing thing in the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH? Ms. Ortiga claims that the only encounter she had with Maine Mendoza is that email. She doesn’t count the photoshoot as the other encounter with the subject. She might be referring to the only time that she got to talk to Maine Mendoza ON EMAIL. Like she had the nerve to write and highlight everything negative about the cover girl and only talk to her by email? Does Ms. Ortiga have any issues with one-on-one interviews? How come it would be the “only” encounter Ms. Ortiga would get with Maine Mendoza? She spent more time documenting her flaws.
Okay, she may be more of a skeptic and less of a hater towards ALDUB as expressed in the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH. But reading the whole article contained 10% about Maine Mendoza and even less about JOWAPAO. She was already there watching the cover girl (and men) in action. She had the opportunity to interview them in person. Instead of doing that, she used the space given to her FOR HER OWN RAMBLINGS about how much of a skeptic is she.
While it’s easy to blame the negative writeup about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH on Ms. Ortiga alone, the bigger question is why did Esquire PH let her get away with this? Is it that time of the month where she’s a flaming hemorrhoid and she needed an outlet of her fury? Furthermore, does she even want to write about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH? It really comes across as a vengeful article to me. Like “You make me write about a topic that I don’t like? I will give you an article that you don’t like!” And now, seems like her goal of taking Esquire PH down the drain with her slightly worked.
I don’t know what issue does she have with Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH. But reading the article courtesy of some screengrabs online got me thinking that Ms. Kara Ortiga has some issues. Well, some people have some issues with Maine Mendoza for real. But not all of them get the opportunity to write in a magazine of nationwide reach like Esquire PH. Not all of them get away with writing a list of bad memories. All narrated in the point of the view of the writer and not of the subjects that she is supposed to interview. This is basically why it reads more like a ranting opinion article than a feature article.
What could have made the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH better?
If I ended up buying a copy of the February 2016 issue of Esquire PH magazine. I’d expect an interview conducted with JOWAPAO and Maine Mendoza. You don’t put them on the cover and write an interview so brief towards the end of the article that it looked more like footnote or an afterthought. All of them. You never disregard the importance of JOWAPAO in the career of Maine Mendoza. (And Alden Richards as well.) You fail to point that out? It will reveal how you, as a writer, view their importance in the ALDUB Phenomenon.
Instead of an interview, you packed your article with unsavory observations from the fans to Alden Richards to Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH. Opinions. If you can’t tell the difference between an opinion article and a feature article, how did you get a job in a magazine? I don’t know if you have done this before to other celebrities featured on your publication. But surely, other celebrities might start having second thoughts about gracing your cover again. What’s the use of being your cover girl if the article ended up sounding spiteful and bitter?
It was an interesting detour from the episode recaps. Perhaps because the article about Maine Mendoza on Esquire PH really got some heads shaking. (And thumbs sore from tweeing Ms. Ortiga for days now.) For the rest of the episode recaps, just follow us on our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. We’d be expecting you.
