The 1999 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

BIOGRAPHY of Raul Locsin

The Philippines is reputed to have the freest mass media system in Asia. It has not always been so. At various points in its long history-one that dates back to the appearance of the news sheet called Del Superior Govierno in 1811-Philippine journalism had to struggle with state repression and censorship. The authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1986) was a recent example.

Even in more democratic times, Philippine media is not wholly free. Where media is embedded in a society marked by deep structural inequalities, there are constraints arising from facts of ownership, distribution, and access. There are always instruments, outside direct censorship, to influence, intimidate, or silence those who carry and distribute the news. There are problems in media itself as a profession, problems occasioned by lack of support, inadequate training, weak ethical standards, and market pressures. Even in the best of times, there is no such thing as an unmanipulated media since what makes for news has to be recognized, selected, processed, and formatted.

Media work, given these realities, is a minefield. This is particularly so in economically depressed, politically volatile Third World environments such as the Philippines. To successfully navigate the dangers in this field and claim for media a respected place both as profession and social institution is no mean achievement. It is an achievement that honors the Filipino journalist Raul L. Locsin.

He entered the profession from a rather surprising origin and by a rather circuitous route.

Raul Lacson Locsin comes from one of the most privileged families in the Philippines. The Locsin family traces its origin to Chinese immigrants who moved from Xiamen (Amoy), China, to the Philippines in the mid-eighteenth century, eventually settling down in the southern province of Iloilo. The family name appears as Locsing in the early records and family members say that their original Chinese name was Sin Loc, which supposedly means "fifth son."

By the early nineteenth century, the Locsins were part of the Chinese and Chinese-mestizo elite in Iloilo, particularly in the Molo and Jaro districts, an area that had grown rich from agriculture and the manufacture of handwoven textiles. By 1855, when Iloilo was opened to world trade, the province was the premier economic hub of the southern Philippines.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought greater prosperity to Iloilo, as sugar cultivation for export expanded into the neighboring, frontier island of Negros. The opening of new plantations primed a large population movement from Iloilo to Negros, one that saw the population of Negros rise from 30,000 in 1850 to 320,606 in 1893. The Locsins were among the first families to branch out to Negros, carving out large tracts of land for sugar cultivation. As early as 1849, the Filipino secular priests Roman Locsin and Eusebio Locsin were the parish priests of Bacolod and Silay, respectively. It is said that they facilitated the migration of their Molo relatives and friends to these parishes. By the 1890s, various Locsins owned thousands of hectares of land in Negros. They owned practically the whole of Silay, a town (later city) fourteen kilometers from the provincial capital of Bacolod.

The Locsins intermarried with other members of the local elite (Lacson, de la Rama, Montelibano, Ledesma) and enjoyed such status and influence that they assumed leadership positions after the fall of the Spanish colonial government in 1898. Aniceto Lacson was a revolutionary general who became president of the Negros provisional revolutionary government under the Aguinaldo Republic in 1898. Leandro R. Locsin was governor of Negros Occidental at the beginning of American rule in 1901. (Negros Island was divided into two provinces, Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental, in 1901.) In the years that followed, various Lacsons and Locsins would become governors, assemblymen, and senators.

The family's prestige was not just economic or political but cultural as well. The Locsins distinguished themselves in education and artistic fields. They were among the ilustrados ("enlightened") of the nineteenth century whose sons attended schools in Manila. Educated and cosmopolitan, they turned Silay into a cultural center that had the reputation of being the "Paris" of the southern Philippines. Descendants of the family would make names for themselves in culture and the arts. These include 1990 National Artist for Architecture Leandro V. Locsin and the well-known writer and publisher Teodoro M. Locsin.

It was against this background that Raul L. Locsin was born in Silay, Negros Occidental, on September 19, 1931, the third of seven children of Aurelio Lacson Locsin and Maria Soledad Sison Lacson. Born in 1896, Aurelio studied law in Manila but forsook a career as a lawyer to help manage the family's sugar plantation and pursue various business and professional interests of his own. He was elected councilor of Silay (1922-1928) and briefly served as municipal president; engaged in real estate and stock brokerage; and ventured into community publishing in Bacolod. He published the local papers Kanlaon and Paghimawa and, more importantly, a Spanish-language daily, El Civismo, which later turned weekly and lasted until the declaration of martial law in 1972. Aurelio was also engaged in labor organizing, mobilizing sugar workers not only for better wages but also as a constituency in local electoral politics.

Raul's mother, Soledad, was of a prominent landowning family of Talisay, Negros Occidental. She attended Assumption school in Manila, was educated in Spanish and English, and started her law studies at the University of the Philippines. Her marriage to Aurelio in 1928, however, intervened. In Negros, she founded and managed a school in Bacolod, Casanova School, and pursued civic and literary interests. She did translations from Spanish to English, including the "definitive" translations from Spanish to English of Jose Rizal's Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, both published in 1996, the year after she died at the age of eighty-eight.

From all these facts, one can surmise that Raul Locsin was not at all raised in the stereotypical image of the Negros plantation aristocracy. His parents spoke Spanish at home and had a sugar hacienda in Silay, residences in Manila and Bacolod, twelve domestic helpers, and three cars. In Bacolod, where Locsin spent much of his childhood, the family residence was so large that, during the years of the Japanese occupation, the Japanese turned it into a hospital. Yet, his parents' involvement in such modern occupations as education, commerce, and journalism shows that theirs was a family that put a premium on self-reliance and productive labor.

With his brothers and sisters, Locsin was raised to do household chores, making the bed, cleaning the house, and washing dishes. Their mother ran a tight household. The children had to be up at four o'clock in the morning. She admonished, "Anybody that the sun catches in bed is not going to be worth anything." She insisted on the children's getting a healthy diet of potatoes, string beans, milk, and carrot juice. Aurelio, the father, was a kind man loved and respected by his children but he, too, trained them to be self-reliant. He told his children he would not skimp on providing them what they needed in food and books but, if it was money they wanted, they had to earn it themselves. Losin recalled that once, when he asked his father for money for the movies, his father refused. Instead, he gifted him with a shoeshine box. That summer, the family limousine would take Locsin and drop him off at the Bacolod town plaza where the boy learned to earn his pocket money by shining shoes. The father's lesson stuck. From that time on, Locsin never asked his parents for money.

Locsin started school at a private American school in Manila and then returned to Bacolod where he continued his studies under his mother who, using the "Calvert Method," taught him so well he was already reading Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Tennyson in English before he turned ten.

When World War II broke out, the family left Bacolod for Silay and then headed for the mountains as the Japanese advanced. Aurelio had been appointed one of the deputies to Governor Alfredo Montelibano of the Free Negros Government. Organized in December 1942 as the civilian authority in unoccupied territory, the Free Negros Government divided Negros Occidental into eight districts, each under a deputy governor. Aurelio Locsin was responsible for the Third District (comprising the towns of Saravia, Silay, Talisay, Bacolod, and Murcia). With a group of families, the Locsins set up camp in the Binugsukan Valley (in the Talisay-Silay-Saravia mountain range), later moving to a location deeper inland because of the threat of Japanese incursions. In this camp, code-named "Casanova" (a name Soledad perpetuated in the name of the Bacolod school she founded after the war), around fifteen families lived, sheltered in houses of rough-hewn logs and cogon roofing. Here the Locsins spent the war years. It was a spartan life during which they subsisted on two meals a day, usually boiled corn grits mixed with rice, cassava or camote, salted or dried fish, and whatever vegetables were available. Occasionally, there would be carabao, monkey, or snake meat. Yet, Raul recalled this time-he was twelve-as one of adventure. He enjoyed the outdoor life, hunting, swimming in the river, gathering wild berries, and even doing guard duty.

But it was a time of privation and danger. Aurelio Locsin had to keep his part of the "free government" going, maintaining communications with anti-Japanese resistance groups and building the morale of the local people. Soledad was the official "propagandist" of the government. She produced anti-Japanese materials in English and Visayan out of a mimeograph machine requisitioned from the Silay Institute and edited The Voice of Freedom, an organ of the Free Negros Government. And she continued to be a teacher to her children. A visitor to the mountain camp later wrote of her: Soledad "deeply impressed me with her intellectual preparedness as well as with the way she instilled patriotism in her children."

When the war was over, the family returned to Bacolod. They found their residence destroyed and had to rebuild it. Aurelio himself had to assume the duty of mayor of Bacolod in the immediate postwar period. Raul and his brothers were sent off to school at Ateneo de Cagayan, in Cagayan de Oro, since the Ateneo in Manila was ruined and had to be rehabilitated. Raul finished high school in Cagayan de Oro and was on his first year of college when he was expelled for getting into a fight. When he told his father that he no longer wanted to go to school, his father responded by saying that if this was what he desired then he would have to find a way of supporting himself. Raul decided to leave home and, with a free pass for steerage, headed for Manila in a boat loaded with pigs. Only seventeen, Raul was practically on his own.

In Manila, the young Locsin lived in a squatters' area in Sampaloc and worked as an itinerant house painter. This was quite remarkable. He was not only a rich man's son but had wealthy and influential relatives in Manila. He showed dogged determination and for about six months he survived as a menial worker in the city.

He may have been reconciled with his family after this since he was soon back in school at Ateneo de Manila, lodging with his uncle Arsenio H. Lacson. The brother of Soledad, Lacson was a colorful personality who had been an amateur boxer, newspaper columnist, and radio commentator when he was elected mayor of Manila in 1951. Hailed as "the best mayor Manila ever had," he was perceived as a leader who could well rise up to be the country's president but his death in 1962 cut short a brilliant political career. Tough but kindhearted, Lacson was an early influence on the young Locsin.

Yet again Locsin was too headstrong and restless to stay long in school. He quit Ateneo before he could earn a bachelor's degree. Responding to an advertisement, he applied for admission at the Philippine Air Force academy in Lipa, Batangas. Here he trained as an aviation cadet but, once again, fate intervened. Before he could earn his wings, he was involved as a witness in a congressional investigation into hazing in the academy. This forced him to abandon the academy after having trained as a cadet for fourteen months.

Locsin moved from job to job. For a time he was back in Bacolod where he had his first taste of journalism, working as a cub reporter, together with his brother Alfio, for his father's El Civismo. For almost three years-first in Manila and then in Bacolod-he worked with San Miguel Corporation, loading and unloading soft-drink bottles from Coca-Cola trucks, later as accounting clerk in the Coca-Cola main office, and then as salesman for the company's Magnolia Division, selling ice cream.

His father asked him to help out in the family business-which, at the time, included the newspaper, a stock brokerage, and a travel agency-but they could not quite agree on policy and Locsin preferred being on his own. For a time, he and his brother Alfio tried to put up an English-language community paper, but this did not last long. Instead, Locsin took an offer to set up the Bacolod station of a struggling, two-aircraft airline called Fast Airways. The shoestring operation did not last long.

He returned to Manila and joined US Tobacco Corporation (owned by the American businessman Harry Stonehill) as a cigarette salesman and, later, the company's unit manager for northern Mindanao. After a run-in with management, he resigned. It was while he was with US Tobacco that, around 1957, he married Leticia P. Martillo of Leyte, with whom he would eventually have six children. The young couple set up residence in Bacolod, but Locsin was constantly on the move. For a time, he rented light planes and flew between Mindanao and Manila, dealing in contraband cigarettes, locally called "blue seal." It was a time when the circulation and consumption of smuggled cigarettes was so open and rampant (even senators smoked smuggled cigarettes) that Locsin never really thought of the legality of what he was doing. But this lasted only some three months.

In 1959, Locsin joined the British-owned Shell Petroleum and moved his family to Manila. He was in marketing, setting up gas stations, selling fuel to bulk consumers, living on the road. He left the job after a year. His work in marketing provided him with a handsome income but he never really liked the job. He recalled meeting an old salesman somewhere in Mindanao who was virtually living out of a hotel room. He saw himself in the old man and decided this was not the life he wanted. The money was good, he said, "but everyday I was unhappy because I hated the job."

In 1963, at the age of thirty-two, he realized it was really writing he loved. Even as a salesman, he spent private hours writing stories and other pieces. His first whiff of printer's ink at his father's newspaper office and his mother's example never really left him. Rather late and in a most roundabout manner, Raul Locsin found his lifework in journalism.

In 1963, he joined the Manila Chronicle as a cub reporter. The salary was measly. "My monthly cub reporter's pay was less than the per diem for one day that I received in Shell." But, he said, "I really wanted to write." From cub reporter, he became a feature writer for the Chronicle's Sunday magazine. He showed his mettle early and even won a prestigious ESSO-NPC Journalism Award in 1963 for an article on land reform.

Reassigned to the paper's business section, he became assistant business editor. Business reporting at the time did not have much of a status as a specialization. It was the poor cousin to other journalistic beats and was not as glamorous or exciting as reporting on crime and politics. In journalism, as in scholarship, economics was considered by many a "dismal science."

In the Philippines, the beginnings of business journalism can be traced back to the Spanish colonial period in the trade sheets and columns of newspaper space that regularly carried shipping information and commodity prices. Early examples of economic journalism are Revista Mercantíl (1865), a weekly commercial sheet that later became a supplement of the broadsheet El Comercio (1858-1925), and the monthly Boletín de la Real Sociedad Económica Filipina de Amigos del País (1882-1899). These were examples of what may be termed specialist publishing, intended not so much for general readers as for merchants, agriculturists, and entrepreneurs who needed practical information for the conduct of their business. But it was the need to make available current trade information and to advertise goods and services, together with the state's need to publish regulations and decrees, that provided an impetus to the emergence of journalism.

In the twentieth century, the pioneer in business reporting was the Manila Daily Bulletin, founded by Americans in 1900 as a shipping journal for the "merchant marine." Supported by shipping interests and initially distributed for free before it went on subscription basis in 1904, the paper announced its purpose thus: "to give the public accurate and reliable shipping and commercial information and nothing else." The "nothing else" may have been a reflex of the fact that, at the time of its founding, the Filipino-American War was in progress and political passions were high over the US occupation of the Philippines. Yet, it also conveyed something of the narrow ambit of what constituted "business journalism" at the time. Manila Daily Bulletin became a newspaper of general coverage in 1912 but maintained a strong interest in the publication of useful business information.

In the 1950s, business sections were standard in general-circulation newspapers. Trade journals were also published, such as the Trade and Commerce Journal (of the Roces group of publications) and the Financial Journal (sister publication of the Fookien Times Yearbook). The business pages of the dailies mainly ran company press releases and government reports. It would be sometime before business reporting gained depth in interpretation and analysis.

When Locsin joined the Chronicle in 1963, business journalism was a nascent field. As he later said, economic reporting prior to the 1960s was "a desolate wasteland." There was a lot of the "according to" type of reportage and little independent analysis. "The business sections [of the newspapers] were more of an accommodation to the advertisers who bought advertising space and expected, even demanded in exchange, editorial exposure to enhance their public image."

Locsin took to business reporting in a diligent and studious way, and found that he loved the challenge. Finding that he had to cover such institutions as the stock market, banks, and bureaus of Customs and Treasury, Locsin read up on what he needed to understand and consulted economists and other specialists. This was the time when Diosdado Macapagal was president (1961-1965). He was the first Philippine president to measure his administration's achievement in terms of increases in the gross national product (GNP). Issues of import and exchange controls, devaluation, industrialization, and the balance of foreign trade were prominent. As industry grew and diversified, the subject of business reportage also became more varied and complicated.

He also learned a lot about the less seemly side of a newspaper's inner workings, such as bribery, "exchange deals," and the influence of publishers and advertisers in the flow of news. Like the other major newspapers, the Chronicle was tied to other interests. Founded by a group of journalists in 1945, it was acquired by the politically and economically powerful Lopez family in 1947. Like the Locsins and Lacsons, the Lopez family was of the Iloilo and Negros elite.

Locsin quickly earned a reputation for journalistic competence. In 1965, the Press Foundation of Asia gave him a fellowship grant at the Kissinger Center at Harvard University. On what was his first trip to the United States, Locsin stayed at Harvard for six months, attending seminars and listening to, among others, Henry Kissinger speak on government and international relations.

In 1964, however, he left the Chronicle. Finance Secretary Rufino Hechanova offered him the post of publisher of the Evening News. Acquired by Harry Stonehill from previous owners in 1960, the newspaper had been placed under government receivership for nonpayment of taxes. This was part of the fallout of Stonehill's deportation in 1962 on charges of large-scale bribery and corrupt business practices. Locsin declined Hechanova's offer, saying that running a government-owned paper might compromise editorial independence. He later accepted an offer by Hechanova, when the latter was no longer with government, to run a weekly business periodical, Economic Monitor, with the understanding that he would have a free hand. He stayed with the paper only a year. His position became untenable when he ran critical stories on big businessmen from whom Hechanova had hoped to drum up financing for the fledgling paper.

He was next offered a senior reporter position by the Manila Times. Locsin, however, had decided he was ready to start his own newspaper.

With its maiden issue on February 27, 1967, Locsin launched Business Day. Bannering the motto, "A newspaper is a public trust," it aimed to cover and explain economic events for decision makers and the public and stay independent from pressure, even from its advertisers and stockholders.

It started as a weekly with a circulation of ten thousand, turned twice-weekly, and became a daily by the end of its first year. It was rough going in the early years. Locsin borrowed money from banks, sold shares of stock, and did most of the work as publisher, editor, business manager, and writer. His wife, Leticia Locsin, was a great partner and a writer herself, having edited movie and trade magazines. Printing had to be jobbed out. Locsin had to rely on the sense of dedication of a young staff of reporters, who had to go through months of not being paid, as the paper struggled to survive in Manila's highly competitive media environment.

From the beginning, Locsin worked to create in the paper a culture of honesty and professionalism. He mentored his editors and reporters in the craft, teaching them to collect economic information accurately; to analyze and interpret the implications of the information; and to get behind the business jargon and communicate facts simply and with authority. He organized reporters into research teams to undertake exhaustive investigations. Locsin put a premium on subdued, authoritative writing, a style that privileged sober fact over sensationalism.

He set the example of editorial integrity by banning companies (and the advertising agencies that represented them) from Business Day's pages if they insisted that the paper promote them editorially, for example, by suppressing critical reports about them. The rule was: "editorial space is never for sale, advertising space is." For the staff, he had a sign put up at the paper's editorial entrance: "Remove your biases and leave them here as you enter; pick them up when you leave."

Locsin insisted on a code of ethics for journalists. Business Day had the rule that reporters should turn over to the paper gifts they received from influence seekers. Those who violated the rule were sanctioned or removed. The paper gave its reporters money for representation expenses, so they did not rely on the generosity of informants or sources. Knowing that one of the main problems of the local media industry was low wages, Locsin worked to establish a standard of just compensation. Business Day paid its people better than did the other papers. In its final years, when the position of the company had greatly improved, employees received bonuses and salaries that amounted to the equivalent of twenty-two months of pay annually.

Business Day introduced what were fresh innovations at the time: a research department, a library, and in-house seminars for the staff with resource persons from the business and finance community. A technology buff, Locsin brought into Business Day trend-setting technological innovations in Philippine journalism. Business Day was the first of the local papers to go into offset printing and "cold typesetting" through the use of IBM computers.

As the paper's president, publisher, and editor, Locsin struggled to get the paper going and the stress may have caused his first heart attack in 1970, when he was only thirty-nine years old. His efforts to turn the paper into a profitable enterprise were guided not by the simple desire for profit but the conviction that financial autonomy would assure the paper's editorial independence. His efforts were rewarded. Business Day's circulation rose from its initial ten thousand to fifty thousand. The paper earned the respect of its readers and colleagues in the industry. It established its claim as "Southeast Asia's first business daily."

Entering its sixth year of existence, Business Day was seriously tested as a newspaper. President Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972. Newspapers and media outlets, including Business Day, were closed down. Numerous journalists were arrested, foreign correspondents were deported or barred from entering the country, and many media workers were harassed, tortured, or murdered. As the Marcos government tightened its hold on the flow of news and information, media came to be dominated by newspapers and television and radio stations owned and operated by either the government or the so-called Marcos "cronies."

Following a brief suspension, Business Day resumed operations after it secured the necessary permits from the Department of National Defense and the new Department of Public Information. Business Day kept under the radar because, being a business publication, it was not perceived as "political." Locsin said Marcos "tolerated" the paper because its businessmen-readers were not the masses but people inclined to be "pissed off" at government anyway. Unlike other papers, its temporary closure was not carried out with military force and when it reopened it did not have to suffer the presence of military censors in its editorial office. "Just censor yourselves," a military officer told Locsin.

To a certain extent, Business Day kept its distance from the more contentious political issues of the day. Locsin himself gave Marcos and his government the benefit of the doubt, thinking that the new order offered opportunities for dismantling oligarchies, assuring peace and order, and pushing economic development. Locsin was a member of the government-initiated Philippine Council for Print Media (PCPM), of which he was vice-chairman, and Publishers Association of the Philippines (PAPI). Organized in 1974, these entities were meant to introduce self-regulatory mechanisms in the print media industry and create the semblance of media's independence from the state. The reality, of course, was that press freedom was severely restricted under the dictatorship.

Business Day maintained its position as a paper with a reputation for accuracy and the sober presentation of facts. In 1976, Locsin was named Economic Editor of the Year by the Press Foundation of Asia and Mitsubishi Public Affairs Committee. Locsin's paper was the only mainstream newspaper that was not part of the established crony press. It kept apart from government's propaganda machinery. It reported independently on the country's actual growth and inflation rates and international reserves, the problem of the foreign debt, and the effects of rising oil prices and depressed wages.

Eventually, Locsin changed his early benign view of Marcos rule. Almost from the beginning, the Left conducted clandestine anti-Marcos propaganda. Dissent began to surface in open and mainstream media, particularly after 1981 when Marcos, in his effort to legitimize his authoritarian rule, "lifted" martial rule, even as he kept his decree-making powers and control over the government's major institutions. An "alternative media" started to develop as critical articles appeared in the newspaper We Forum (launched in 1977, later to become Malaya) and the magazines WHO, Panorama (the weekend magazine of Bulletin Today), and Mr. & Ms. (a women's magazine established in 1977, which began to carry political articles after 1981). There was some space for dissent since these papers-and bolder publications such as the Catholic Church-affiliated Signs of the Times and the University of the Philippines student publication Philippine Collegian-were limited-circulation papers. Moreover, Marcos could point to them as proof that, under his rule, the press was "free."

The martial-law government's threshold of tolerance, however, was narrow, as shown in such cases as the forced resignation of Panorama's editor, Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, in 1981. In other, less high-profile cases, journalists were forced out of work, threatened, jailed, or murdered.

In this climate, Business Day emerged as an example of nonpartisan reporting. Restrained and studiously objective, Locsin preferred to call his paper "independent" rather than "alternative." Nevertheless, many recognized the paper's virtues. On December 10, 1982, on the United Nations' Human Rights Day, Locsin was one of the journalists honored by the Concerned Women of the Philippines. He was cited for "his consistent management policy which espouses truth, fairness, balance and objectivity in reporting economic issues."

The watershed for Locsin and his paper was the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. on August 21, 1983. After the assassination, a wave of revulsion and protest swept the country. The economy went into a spin, and it was hard to separate economic news from political news. Business Day took up the challenge and came out with a bold editorial condemning the Aquino assassination. The country's business executives, the paper's core constituency, had been galvanized into action and Business Day became their voice. Locsin explained in an editorial after the Aquino assassination:

When Business Day first came out some 17 years ago, we said: "This newspaper addresses itself to the leaders of the community-the men in government, and the executives and businessmen-and to those who must go out and earn a living. These men make decisions of varying impact on the circles around them, and the quality of their decisions depends on the reliability of the information on which their decisions are based. These men need to be informed, and they are entitled to responsible, objective reporting of the news.

Over the years, this newspaper undertook the task of reporting on business and government within the parameters of what it termed in its first editorial as the "field of economic journalism." This was the world of the corporate boardroom, of companies strung across the globe by ticker tape, of banks and financial institutions, of government ministers and multinationals, of chambers of commerce and embassies.

. . . Overnight, however, this world has changed. And this same businessman, once isolated in his executive suite, has now taken to the streets, chanting the same slogans, demanding the same rights, asking for the same justice as those of the nameless masses marching on the avenues of Metro Manila. Suddenly, the businessman is also the citizen, now conscious, now aware that there are other things outside the confines of the boardroom that have meaning. And because the businessman has ventured out into this brave new world, we in Business Day, his chroniclers, must follow him to match the needs of his new awareness and be even more relevant to our own journalistic commitments.

Business Day played a key role in getting out factual stories to local and foreign readers. It expanded its coverage of political news and became a forum for independent, critical reporting. It reprinted the position papers of an anti-Marcos business sector's group called Manindigan and controversial articles in the foreign media, such as the Pulitzer prize-winning San Jose Mercury News series on the Marcos hidden wealth. Marcos told a journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer that Locsin's paper was "notorious." Readers turned to it as "the only credible paper." As the journalist Amando Doronila wrote: "It stood out like a beacon of critical-not polemical-journalism in a sea of conformity in the controlled press. In the days leading to the People Power Revolution, Business Day was an important source of independent news and was widely cited by the international press." Business Day's sudden rise to prominence was indicated by the fact that its circulation soared to ninety thousand copies in the turbulent years of 1983-1986. Through it all, Locsin maintained his journalistic equanimity. He said of his role at this time that he was only doing his job as a journalist.

Locsin's paper hewed to the highest standards of journalism by keeping the flow of information and ideas open at a time when journalism was tested by state repression, social confusion, and inflamed political passions. When the Marcos government was overthrown in the spectacular People Power Revolution of 1986, Business Day could rightfully claim it had made a signal contribution to the restoration of the country's democratic institutions.

In 1986, Locsin was adjudged "International Editor of the Year" by the New York-based World Press Review. Presented to an editor outside the United States, the award honored Locsin for "his role as a leader and symbol of a brave journalistic minority who fanned the flame of press freedom throughout the Marcos tyranny, and for unstinting professionalism that made his newspaper a rock of credibility amid the swirling rumors and disinformation of Ferdinand Marcos' last days."

As in the past, Locsin kept his distance from power in the post-Marcos era. He was critical in the aftermath of the People Power Revolution, believing that the government of Corazon Aquino had not pushed reform far enough, that opportunities had been "squandered," and that what happened at EDSA was a halfway revolution and not a "real" one.

Business Day had reached a high point in its life. Admired as a model of credibility and integrity in Philippine journalism, it was a success in financial terms as well. Mainly subscriber-based, 99 percent of its circulation went to subscribers. It enjoyed steady corporate advertising. Organized into three sister companies-Businessday Corporation, Businessday Information Systems and Services, Inc., and Businessday Marketing Corporation-it employed around a hundred people. Martial law failed to stop its presses and, after twenty years of operations, Locsin had paid off all the debts he incurred in putting up the paper.

Unforeseen events, however, brought Business Day to a sudden end. The paper had taken in young, bright activists of the Left-almost straight from Marcos's detention centers-to work in the staff. In 1987, these activists organized a union and staged a strike that Locsin saw was more than just a simple labor dispute but a bid to take control of the paper's management. Refusing to surrender his prerogatives, Locsin decided to close down Business Day on June 5, 1987. He felt he had accomplished what he had set out to do in journalism and, faced with health problems, he looked forward to devoting himself to more leisurely pursuits.

Journalism, however, did not let go of Locsin. Days after Business Day ceased operations, around sixty nonunionized employees of the paper picketed his suburban home, urging him to return. He told them that they should set up their own paper. If he succeeded with Business Day, he said, they could too. With Locsin's advice, the employees proceeded to set up a new paper and "hired" Locsin to head it.

Business World was born weeks after Business Day closed down. Building on the readership and market Business Day had, the new venture followed the same formula and approach that made its predecessor a success. It also introduced a novel concept, encouraged by Locsin's growing conviction that those who run the paper should own it. Thus, Business World Publishing Corporation is owned 70 percent by its employees (in the form of a provident fund) and 30 percent by businessman Enrique Zobel. Zobel had urged Locsin, after Business Day's closure, to start another business paper as Zobel "no longer had a paper to read." Zobel agreed to contribute part of the capital but declared he did not wish to profit from it and would instead allocate the return on his investment for a scholarship fund for the newspaper's employees.

With Locsin's leadership as president, publisher, and editor (he prefers to call himself an "employee" of the company), Business World became the country's leading business newspaper. It appeared five days a week and had achieved a national and foreign circulation of fifty-four thousand by 1999, ranking fourth in the industry (general broadsheets included) in terms of advertising revenues. It employed around three hundred people. The paper has since added an exclusive Saturday online edition. Moreover, its electronic archives, Codex, begun in 1994, is one of the country's most extensive databanks for business news and information.

Carrying over into the new paper lessons learned in Business Day, Locsin upgraded the paper's technology. The paper went into full desktop publishing; equipped reporters with such tools as digital cameras; and set up a computerized and miniaturized data bank that is the envy of most Manila newspapers. In 1991, it incorporated World Press, a wholly owned printing subsidiary, and, in 1994, moved into new corporate headquarters in Quezon City. In 1995, it also became the first Philippine newspaper to go into online publishing. Its allied publications include the monthly Business World Files and the annual Business World Top 1000 Corporations in the Philippines.

Locsin continued to work with the same dedication he invested on Business Day, reporting for work at six o'clock in the morning and leaving at six o'clock in the evening in the course of the paper's work week. His wife Leticia ably assisted him in the day-to-day management as executive editor.

Outside his own newspaper, Locsin was active in the effort to professionalize Philippine journalism. He was a trustee of the Philippine Press Institute and a member of the Press Foundation of Asia, an organization of newspapers, publishers, and editors in Asia. These internationally affiliated organizations, formed in 1964 and 1967, respectively, are devoted to upgrading standards of journalistic practice through training and various other programs.

Through his participation in these programs, Locsin contributed to strengthening the country's hundreds of community newspapers. He joined training workshops in various parts of the country to speak to young journalists. Under the auspices of the Press Foundation of Asia, he was also a lecturer from 1984 to 1987 at an annual seminar at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. At these seminars, he gave briefings to American editors and publishers on Asian economic and political issues. In 1992, he was in the United States on a two-month visit, under the auspices of the US Information Agency, as the 1992 Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Fellow for Professional Development.

In his career as a journalist, Raul Locsin remained steadfast in his dedication to four things: the need for professionalism, the value of business and economic reporting, the importance of press freedom, and journalism's role in social progress. He did not deal with these in the abstract but embodied them in his work as publisher, editor, and writer.

In professionalizing media, he not only put a premium on mentorship and training, he showed by his own example independence and dignity in the practice of the profession. He recognized that one does not foster professionalism in a vacuum, one has to build the structures and conditions in which this can flourish. As a publisher, he was attuned to the need to improve processes of media production and harness the latest technology to improve the tools of journalists and the quality of their product. He helped lead the way in providing journalists with material benefits that would empower them as media professionals. With Business World, he set in motion a precedent-setting model in which those who worked in producing a newspaper owned it.

He took as his own challenge the field of economic journalism. He was convinced that reporting on business had a vital contribution to make, particularly in societies where the imperatives of economic development undergirded many of the social and political problems faced by the population. Business and economic journalism-he would later say, citing a Columbia School of Journalism textbook-is "the war correspondence of the nineties." He saw that a business paper is important not only for conveying business information but in shaping public decision making. It is not only a trade journal or commercial bulletin but also a medium through which general readers are brought to an awareness of the environment in which they live. Shorn of jargon, after all, Locsin pointed out, economic reporting is "nothing more than simply telling stories about nations trying to develop, companies making profits or losing them, and people trying to earn a living."

He believed that the meaningful practice of journalism required freedom of the press. He was passionate about freedom of expression as "the anchor on which all our other rights rest." "All our other rights remain meaningless and defenseless without it," he said. He consistently resisted the influence of government and advertisers on editorial policy. He wrote editorials attacking such encroachments on media freedom as the move of the Corazon Aquino government in 1986 to assume control over the debt-saddled, "Marcos crony" newspapers and certain television channels, as well as the libel suit filed by President Joseph Estrada in 1999 against the Manila Times. Even as he acknowledged excesses and weaknesses among media practitioners, he believed that in a free market of ideas the public had the capacity to decide what was responsible and true.

For Locsin, journalism was more than just a trade. It answered to a basic human and social need. "The press is nothing more than an offspring of a basic human function. It stems from the human right to speak . . . free men must be able to exchange ideas in the conduct of their daily lives. Limits on what they say and the way they say it restrict their right to live as they wish to live."

Finally, despite his origins in the Philippine landed elite, he felt very strongly about creating "a more egalitarian society with more equal wealth and opportunities, where the burdens and harvest of growth can be equitably shared." In a 1990 Business World editorial, he wrote: "It seems that this nation, its system of government, its leadership and even its ostensibly enlightened citizenry have all conspired to condemn all of us to live and relive a history of inescapable poverty and injustice. Injustice attended by violence to both the human body and spirit, fostered by gross inequalities and entrenched by shameless public graft and corruption." As a journalist and a citizen, Locsin refused to yield to despair and did what he could to face up to the challenge of change and social improvement. It may have taken him time to find his mission in life but he got there and made the most of it.

Of casual demeanor but disciplined, Raul Locsin usually dressed in a denim shirt and blue jeans. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, something of his manner carried over into his writing style, which is simple, lucid, and straightforward. While some of his editorials can be eloquent and passionate, he avoided high-flown, abstruse rhetoric, seeking always to communicate directly to his paper's reader. He carried himself with no trace of flamboyance but, as a journalist-friend remarked, "he is as tough as steel inside."

While fragile in health-he survived two strokes, the second in 1997-he was an avid sportsman. During the martial-law period, to relax himself, he took to motorcycle riding and went on frequent cross-country rides on weekends. He was so taken by the pleasures of riding that he organized the Cycle Sports Association of the Philippines to promote motorcycle racing. Such was his love for the sport that sometime in 1981, when he was fifty, he broke his back going on a motocross jump. He loved the challenge: "It drives me to seek excellence in a lot of other things. The battle is always with myself. . . . If I were much younger, I'd probably try bungee-jumping."

Locsin loved poetry, literature, fine wine, and good food. He enjoyed mentoring young reporters, even taking them out to expensive restaurants to teach them the niceties of table manners and choice of wine because he believed that such social skills would give them confidence in interacting with the leaders of business and government they would be interviewing. He taught and inspired them. One of his reporters said, "His standards were very high and he made you strive to be good, but he did it in such a way that it was attainable." Locsin himself said, "I can be tolerant of mistakes, because we are only human. But I think everyone must aspire for excellence. I am intolerant of people who are not committed to improving themselves." His mentoring paid off. Prominent media practitioners today honed their talent with Locsin. At one time, practically all the business pages of the Manila dailies were staffed by Business Day alumni.

Locsin may have arrived at his calling by a rather slow and circuitous route. Yet, he had always been consistent in his search for self-improvement. Looking back in 1996 to his life in journalism, he said: "In a sense, my attitude was like that of a bumblebee described on a sign hanging in Edwards Air Force Base in the United States. The sign said that the bumblebee, by any standard of aeronautical design, cannot fly. But it doesn't know that anyway, so it flies. So, I learned the hard way the intricacies of a newspaper after running through a gauntlet of debts and the most difficult times for close to 20 years."

Though he came from an extremely wealthy family, he always believed in making his own way and building a life from his own abilities and effort. He recounted that his great- grandfather practically owned their hometown of Silay but had so many sons that Locsin's grandfather inherited only around 256 hectares. Locsin's own father inherited, in his turn, only around twenty-five though he subsequently acquired, through marriage and his own effort, 158 hectares more. Even then, his father refused simply to live off the land, engaging himself in other labors. Raul, for his part, refused to rely on what he would inherit from his parents and convinced his brothers and sisters to have their mother keep the whole estate since they all had their own professions and careers. "If I stayed in Negros Occidental," he said, "I would not have been planting anything because there was nothing to plant on except for flower pots." He did not believe in just passing on wealth. While he took up the responsibility of nurturing his children and providing them with the best education, he was confident they could build independent careers for themselves.

In the fullness of his career, Raul L. Locsin was conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, on August 31, 1999. The award took cognizance of his multifaceted journalistic career and honored "his enlightened commitment to the principle that, above all, a newspaper is a public trust."

Beset by health problems, Locsin died at Saint Luke's Medical Center in Quezon City on the morning of May 24, 2003. He was seventy-one. Despite his many achievements, he remained unassuming to the end, saying that, living his professional life, he had been guided by something quite simple: "It is leaving the world a better place than I found it."


Resil B. Mojares

REFERENCES

Cornejo's Commonwealth Directory of the Philippines. Edited by Manuel R. Cornejo. Manila: Miguel R. Cornejo, 1939.

Defensor, Benjamin. "Economic Reporting." Philippine Journalism Review (December 1990): 28-31.

Doronila, Amando. "A Journalist to Believe In." Sunday Inquirer Magazine, August 29, 1999, pp. 8, 10.

Echauz, Robustiano. Sketches of the Island of Negros. Translated by Donn V. Hart. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1978.

"Editor Criticizes Marcos' Policies." Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 3, 1984.

"International Editor of the Year." World Press Review (July 1986): 4-5.

Larkin, John A. Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Locsin, Raul. "Free Press and Free Speech." Mr. & Ms., December 28, 1982, pp. 16-17.

______. "In My Own Words." Asia 21, March 1996, pp. 8-10.

______. Interview by James R. Rush. Tape recording. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila, September 2, 1999.

______. "Where We Are Now," Business World, July 27, 1990, pp. 21, C1.

Lopez, Antonio. "A Man of His Word." Asiaweek, August 6, 1999, p. 51.

Pineda-Ofreneo, Rosalinda. The Manipulated Press: A History of Philippine Journalism since 1945. Metro Manila: Solar Publishing Corporation, 1986.

"Raul Locsin, 71: The Best in the Business." Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 25, 2003, pp. 1, A7.

"Reiterating a Stand." Business World, July 23, 1999, p. 5.

Romero, Ma. Fe Hernaez. Negros Occidental between Two Foreign Powers (1888-1909). Bacolod: Negros Occidental Historical Commission, 1974.

Soriano, Marcelo B. The Quiet Revolt of the Philippine Press. Manila: WE Forum, 1981.

Tirol, Vicente G. "The Press during Martial Law: Resistance and Triumph." In Seven in the Eye of History, edited by Asuncion David Maramba, 43-81. Metro Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2000.

Uriarte, Higinio de. A Basque among the Guerrillas of Negros. Translated by Soledad Lacson-Locsin. Bacolod: Civismo Weekly, 1962.

Various interviews and correspondence with individuals familiar with Raul L. Locsin and his work; other primary documents.