TOUGH AND SHARP
Tony Lopez: The man behind the publishing success called BizNewsAsia, the largest business and news magazine
I n 2008, BizNewsAsia (BNA) chalked up 350,000 in passon circulation. Its bestselling issue each year, The BNA Power100, a listing of the most powerful and influential Filipinos, has been selling 35,000 copies.
Power 100 is also a registry of the Philippines’ who’s who in politics, business, and other professions.
Tony Lopez is one of the most senior and prominent journalists in the Philippines today. He has 44 years of journalism experience here and abroad in fields such as business, the economy, politics, climate change, globalization, terrorism, regional and world affairs.
He is the president, publisher, and editor of BizNewsAsia, the Philippines’ leading and most influential weekly business magazine.
Lopez also writes a column Wednesday and Friday for Manila Standard and co-hosts a weekly business-oriented TV talk show.
He worked for 25 years as senior correspondent for Time Warner’s Hong Kongbased weekly, Asiaweek with responsibility for the Philippines and the rest of the region. He made Asiaweek the largest international news magazine in the Philippines. His Asiaweek work helped put the Philippines on the world map. He wrote about the events that shaped one of Asia’s largest economies in population and economic size, the Philippines, both during its moment of great peril during the martial law years and its re-emergence as a bastion of democracy, economic revival, and good governance.
For his reportage and Asiaweek work, he won the TOYM in 1985 for international journalism, the Outstanding Manilan in 1989 for international journalism, and the Gold Medal as Hero of EDSA Awardee from The
Philippine Star. The Pilipino Reporter magazine made him its Journalist of the Year while the Rotary Club of Manila gave him an award for distinguished foreign correspondence.
Tony Lopez was the first journalist to win the TOYM after 17 years (the awards were stopped during martial law). The gold medal and trophy were given by no less than President Cory Aquino who noted Tony’s brand of courageous but balanced journalism in the martial law years. He was the youngest in the 1985 TOYM batch that included Miriam Santiago, Greg Honasan, Delfin Lazaro, William Padolina, and Dong Puno.
Lopez started professional journalism in 1970 as a business writer for The Manila Chronicle, joining The Manila Times as a senior business reporter and construction editor a year later. With martial law, he lost his Times job but was hired by The Mainichi Shimbun to be its Manila correspondent. Later, he joined The
Times Journal becoming Manila’s youngest business editor and a columnist. In 1975, he joined Asiaweek as a correspondent, rising to the rank of senior correspondent. The UST College of Arts and Letters made him one of its Most Outstanding Alumni in Journalism in the last 100 years. The university made him one of its Most Outstanding Thomasians in the field of arts and letters.
Aside from his Asiaweek work from 1975 to 2001, Tony was also a longtime correspondent of The Mainichi, Japan’s oldest newspaper, and was a correspondent for major German TV stations ARD and ZDF.
He is a founding member of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, (FOCAP), longtime member of the National Press Club, and the only six-time president of the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC), Asia’s oldest press club.
He is at present, chairman of the MOPC, a member of the board of governors and vice president of the Philippine Constitution Association (Philconsa), silver member of the Rotary Club of Manila, and a member of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP).