Eugenia Apostol

Early life and education Apostol was born on September 29, 1925, the second child and second daughter among eight children of Fernando Ballesteros Duran, a doctor and member of the National Assembly, and Vicenta Obsum. In 1936, when her father was re-elected to the National Assembly, the family moved to Manila, where Apostol attended Holy Ghost College (now College of the Holy Spirit), where she finished elementary school as valedictorian in 1938.

With the Japanese occupation of Manila in 1944, the family returned to Sorsogon. While poking through the ruins of their home after the battle for liberation, 18-year-old Apostol was injured by shrapnel when an unspent bazooka shell exploded. Apostol graduated magna cum laude at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Letters in 1949. Novelist F. Sionil Jose was among Apostol's classmates at UST, and recalled her as being "a very good writer, very sweet, very hardworking."

In 1954, Apostol became women's section editor and associate editor of Sunday Times magazine, the supplement of the country's leading daily, The Manila Times. She stayed with the Times for ten years (1954–64), working with both the magazine and the newspaper. She found light work in handling, as editor and writer, the traditional women's beat of home, fashion, food, and human-interest features, and had a knack for infusing something lively, fresh, and innovative into what would otherwise be "canned" and conventional. Apostol quit Woman's Home Companion in 1975. In March 1976, she established the Ex Libris Publishing Company, Inc. alongside Defense Secretary Enrile and his wife Cristina through their JAKA Investments Corporation. After a few months, the publisher struggled with its finances, and by September 1976 was assisted by businessmen Luis Villafuerte and Ramon Siy in additional funding and the restructuring Ex Libris, after which Apostol launched the Mr. & Ms. magazine in 1977. Ex Libris became Mr. & Ms. Publishing Co., Inc., and was operated as a partnership among friends, with the Apostol couple, the Enrile couple, Villafuerte and Siy having equal shares in the company (1000 each) up to the mid-1980s. According to Apostol, the magazine struggled for five years before it broke even due to a crowded women's magazine market.

Apostol published a series of Mr. & Ms. supplements authored by Nick Joaquin - re-tellings of Philippine legends and mythology which were later bound as Pop Stories for Groovy Kids, recognized as an important contribution to the history of children's fiction in the Philippines.

Politicalization During the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Apostol used the variety magazine as a platform to air anti-government views, publishing articles that would otherwise be banned in less independent media. In December 1982 the National Intelligence Bureau summoned eight women journalists including Apostol for interrogation at an army camp - described by outright "intimidation" by Ceres Doyo, one of the women interrogated. When opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. was assassinated, Apostol launched a weekly supplement to Mr. & Ms. devoted entirely to anti-Marcos politics, Mr. & Ms. Special Edition.

Examples of articles published in Mr. & Ms. viewed as anti-Marcos These examples were contained in the National Press Club publication The Philippine Press Under Siege Volume II "The Silencing of Letty Magsanoc" (by Salvador P. Lopez, from 'Freedom of the Press', Mr. & Ms., July 28, 1981) "The Letty Magsanoc Story" (by Leonor J. Aureus, originally submitted to Celebrity magazine but subsequently pulled by the author because of censorship. Mr. & Ms., August 25, 1981) Freedom of the Press series, Mr. & Ms., August to October 1981) "Transcript: President Marcos responds to Eugenia Apostol's questions about the Magsanoc case", Mr. & Ms. 1981) "Why is Tony Nieva in Jail?" (by Leonor J. Aureus, published May 10, 1983) "Too Late the Memo (of General Ver)" (by Eugenia D. Apostol, published February 15, 1983) "Jose Rizal Lecture" (by Jose W. Diokno, delivered at the P.E.N. conference on The Writer in a Climate of Fear July 2, 1983, published by Mr. & Ms., July 26, 1983)

Mr. & Ms. Special Edition On August 21, 1983, opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. was assassinated upon his arrival from exile in the United States. Though the funeral drew over two million people, it was ignored by most of the media. In a recorded interview, Apostol described her reaction: "Next day, I said: 'What's this? Not a single photo of the funeral in the papers, as if nothing happened.' What really got me was the Times Journal - owned by Benjamin Romualdez, brother of Mrs. Imelda Marcos. What they printed was the photo of the spectator who was hit by lightning — that was their top news!"

A Time magazine article that hailed Apostol as an Asian hero, described what she did next: "Apostol fumed. Within days she was printing a tabloid version of her glossy Mr. & Ms. called Mr. & Ms. Special Edition. It had 16 pages of photographs showing Aquino's body, the multitudes that came to view it, and the massive funeral parade that wound through the streets of Manila for almost 12 hours. The first run was some half a million copies, yet it could not satisfy demand. In the coming months, as momentum built for the People Power revolution that would topple Marcos three years later, Apostol turned the tabloid into a weekly endeavor, putting it out from a raggedy office that, for security reasons, did not even have the publication's name on the door."

Apostol had instructed her staff to put out a special report on Aquino in the September 2, 1983, issue of Mr. & Ms. as well as a "special edition" sixteen-page supplement about the funeral. The supplement sold 750,000 copies and had a significant impact in arousing public anger at the dictatorship. The public response to the forty-page, black-and-white weekly was described as "phenomenal". Sales rose from two hundred thousand to half-a-million copies, numbers unprecedented in the country. The appearance of the publication was a high moment in the campaign against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Ferdinand Marcos was toppled by a popular uprising known as the People Power Revolution in 1986. The "Philippine Inquirer" name was suggested by Magsanoc who took inspiration from The Philadelphia Inquirer in the United States. Initially focused on the trial, it slowly acquired all the elements of a regular paper. Its final issue came out on December 2, 1985, after the Sandiganbayan handed down its controversial decision acquitting the accused.

Philippine Daily Inquirer In January 1985, Apostol had invited some of the country's biggest mass-media publishers to breakfast in her home to suggest a new publishing project. The group included Joaquin "Chino" Roces of the Manila Times, Teodoro Locsin, Sr. and Teodoro Locsin, Jr. of the Philippines Free Press, Raul Locsin of Business Day, Jose Burgos Jr. of WE Forum and Malaya, and Betty Go-Belmonte of the Fookien Times. Apostol's goal was to persuade the group to launch a single daily newspaper, but other than Go-Belmonte, the group was largely unenthusiastic. The newspaper's first issue was published on December 9, 1985. a non-profit organization based in Pasig with the aim to improve facilities and teaching in Philippine public schools, publish books and produce video documentaries about martial law under Ferdinand Marcos, the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. and the People Power Revolution titled Duet for EDSA (1996), Batas Militar (1997), Dead Aim: How Marcos Ambushed Philippine Democracy (1997), Lakas Sambayanan: People Power (2002), EDSA 1986: Mga Tinig ng Himagsikan (2006) and Beyond Conspiracy: 25 Years After the Aquino's Assassination (2008). During the presidency of Fidel Ramos, moves were made to revise the Philippine Constitution to extend the presidential term of office. Apostol published a sixteen-page, tabloid-size satirical weekly called Hu! Ha!, to oppose charter change and expose regressive political practices. The weekly covered the 1998 elections and ran from September 20, 1997, to May 16, 1998.

When President Joseph Estrada called for an advertising boycott of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and sued Manila Times over a corruption story, Apostol set up the Pinoy Times. Apostol designed it as a popular tabloid for the masses, written in everyday Filipino it attempted to deliver "quality journalism with the price, size and liveliness of a tabloid". From an initial run of 30,000 copies, its regular five-days-a-week edition rose to a circulation of 170,000 in just eighteen months. Its weekend Special Edition sold as many as half-a-million copies. The paper was met with bomb threats, hate mail, and libel suits from Estrada supporters, who at one point published an imitation tabloid in an attempt to undermine the Pinoy Times. A popular uprising - known as People Power II - forced Estrada out of power in 2001. Estrada's departure sent the sales of Pinoy Times into a slump. The paper closed on December 21, 2001, after two years in circulation.

Recognition In the November 2006 issue of Time magazine (international edition), Apostol and Letty Jimenez Magsanoc were cited thus: "Apostol, now 81, and Magsanoc, in her mid-60s, were not firebrands in their younger days. Both were veterans of the lipstick beat, writing for the lifestyle sections of newspapers. But the assassination of Aquino, which sparked [the People Power Revolution], galvanized Apostol and Magsanoc to break the local media's complicit silence surrounding Marcos' oppressive rule. In late 1985 they phased out Mr. & Ms. Special Edition and launched the Philippine Daily Inquirer, trailblazing a brand of hard-hitting, mischievous, in-your-face reporting that tested the limits of a dictator's tolerance and helped Filipinos win their freedom. 'In three months,' says Apostol, 'the Inquirer had not only helped to oust Marcos, it was also making money.' Today, the Inquirer is the country's largest newspaper and, while sometimes criticized for sensationalism, it has been unflinching in its coverage of government and the Philippines' uneasy transition to democracy."