Changing with the times
IN 1967, Southeast Asia’s fi rst business daily, BusinessDay, was born in the Philippines. It was the brainchild of Raul L. Locsin, a onetime business reporter for Manila Chronicle, who needed to take out a P5,000 loan from a bank to fund the project. Being the fi rst of its kind, BusinessDay had to make a case for a business- oriented newspaper. Apparently, the public fairly quickly warmed up to the concept; the paper went from being a weekly publication to being a daily one in the space of one year.
During the martial law period, in which press freedom was severely curtailed, Mr. Locsin’s former employer was shut down, but his publishing company was spared the suppression. It seemed that a paper whose focus was business news was not much of threat to the former President Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship. But in June of 1987, a little more than year after the historic People Power Revolution overthrew Mr. Marcos, a labor problem led to the shuttering of BusinessDay.
The next month, Mr. Locsin, with help from his former BusinessDay employees, formed a new publishing company, BusinessWorld Publishing Corp., that puts out a broadsheet of the same name. The fi rst issue was rolled out on July 27, 1987. In the next 15 years or so, under Mr. Locsin’s judicious leadership and editorship, BusinessWorld rose to journalistic prominence, earning widespread admiration from the business community, the public and even other media companies for its thoughtful and penetrating business and economic reporting.
After Mr. Locsin died in 2003, his wife, Leticia Locsin, took over the company. When she herself passed away two years later, Barbara Locsin, their daughter, managed the company for a while.
In 2015, BusinessWorld became part of The Philippine STAR Media Group ( PhilSTAR), after PhilSTAR bought a majority stake in BusinessWorld from Hastings Holdings, Inc.
Hastings, which has a majority interest in PhilSTAR, is a subsidiary of MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., a Beneficial Trust Fund Unit of PLDT, Inc. Roby A. Alampay serves as BusinessWorld’s editor-in-chief, while Miguel G. Belmonte is the president and chief executive officer.
In the 30 years since BusinessWorld’s founding, the entire media landscape has changed dramatically. There seems to be more news outlets today than at any other time in history, thanks to the Internet. Media companies have found themselves competing not only with one another but with social media giants like Facebook and Twitter for the attention of the netizens. Content consumers are increasingly opting to read stories on their smartphones, tablets and laptops, and ignoring newspapers and magazines.