117 Years into the future
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Still, technology to us is only a means to an end, though it has revolutionized the way we now conduct our business. Each story is now delivered many ways—on print, on air, online— but other than that, we are still The Manila Bulletin, which, for the most part of modern Philippine history, has been “The Nation’s Leading Newspaper.”
To this day, 117 years since we first saw the light of print, The Manila Bulletin continues to be the preferred broadsheet, edging out other newspapers in terms of national readership score.
According to the third quarter of the 2016 Nielsen Consumer and Media View Study, among 696,000 broadsheet readers, 10 years and older, across all socioeconomic classes in urban Philippines, 47 percent read The Manila Bulletin. This is nine percentage points higher than our top competitor, the Philippine Daily Inquirer. This is particularly true in the National Capital Region (NCR), where The Manila Bulletin enjoys the patronage of 54 percent of broadsheet readers in Metro Manila and 57 percent in Mega Manila, a score double that of our main competitor, which has to share the rest of the pie with the other newspapers.
What’s more, we have the most number of loyal readers. The 2016 Nielsen report has revealed that 42 percent of broadsheet readers, projected at 291,000, are reading no newspapers other than The Manila Bulletin.
The celebration of our 117th anniversary, while it draws from our deep archives of memories, is about moving forward, eye on the future, and with no other than our young readers to help lead us there. Contrary to popular notions, according to the Nielsen study, our readership comprises 35 percent of broadsheet readers who are below 30 years old or about 113,000 of the 696,000 broadsheet readers surveyed in the second quarter of last year.
That’s just talking about the newspaper. Our online products have an even astoundingly stronger following among the youth. The Facebook page of Manila Bulletin Lifestyle, for instance, as of press time, is enjoying at least 32,000 more followers—and each one completely organic—than the most followed lifestyle page of our competitors. Our technology pages, Technews, on print and online, have been constantly on top of the game, an authority in a realm whose authorities are always challenged by the winds of change or replaced as soon as a new model or a new system or a more compressed, more innovative version is introduced to the market.
A product of the Filipino people, by the Filipino people, and for the Filipino people, ours among the broadsheets has the most coverage of news outside the NCR, with pages upon pages devoted entirely to Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao, and with a Chinese version already circulating online, to boot. Published seven days a week, along with its tabloid newspapers Tempo in English and Balita in Filipino, it also comes with Style Weekend every Friday and the Digital Generation magazine once every quarter, as well as the venerated Philippine Panorama every Sunday, a cultural and literary icon that was hailed the third most read magazine in Metro Manila by Nielsen in 2015, next to FHM and Cosmopolitan, as well as the most read with 64 percent of the readers in the third and final quarters of 2014 among
That’s not all: also publishes monthly magazines in full color—Agriculture, Going Places, Animal Scene, Garage, and Wedding Essentials—to serve many other sectors of the reading public. In addition to these magazines, it publishes vernacular weeklies, such as Bisaya in Cebuano, Bannawag in Ilocano, and Hiligaynon in Ilonggo, as well as the iconic Liwayway in Tagalog, founded no less than by writer, playwright, and theater director Severino Reyes, the institution in Filipino pop culture who went by the pseudonym “Lola Basyang.”
Under MB Publishing, The Manila Bulletin has also produced special publications, such the 323-page Filipino Artists and their Studios by Pinggot Zulueta featuring every Filipino artist of importance, The Front Pages of Philippine History, and Feng Shui Essentials by Hong Kong geomancer Joseph Chau.