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The city was in the midst of an uneasy peace and on the brink of another
war when the paper named after it—The Manila Times—first hit the
streets on October 11, 1898. Just a little over three weeks earlier, the
President of the First Philippine Republic, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, had
been forced to move out of his headquarters in Bacoor, Cavite, on orders
of the commander of the American occupation forces (who had won the sham
battle, of Manila Bay on August 13 of that year). So to Malolos,
Bulacan, trooped Aguinaldo and his followers to open the Revolutionary
Congress on September 15.
A fortnight later, all
roads again led to Malolos, now the capital of the Republic, where
Congress had ratified the proclamation of independence made in Kawit,
Cavite, on June 12 of that year. Congress declared September 29 “a
public holiday in perpetuity.”
In his book Manila, My
Manila National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin writes that during
those times, while the Filipinos had their attention focused on what was
going on in Malolos, the Americans had their eyes glued to what was
going on in Paris. The Constitution of the Philippines was finished and
approved on November 29, 1898—“but much good it did us in convincing
the peace conference in Paris that we were already a sovereign
nation.”
October 11, 1898, was still
less than four months away from the first shot in San Juan that would
signal the start of open hostilities between the Filipino
revolutionaries and the American occupation forces. But the air of
mistrust between the “liberated” brown-skinned Orientals and their
new colonial masters was very thick, particularly in Manila and its
surrounding provinces. Against this backdrop The Manila Times was born.
Luis Serrano, in his
History of The Manila Times, writes that on October 11, 1898, shortly
after news was received in Manila that the Paris Conference had started
and would finally approve the treaty that would transfer the Philippines
from Spanish to American sovereignty, Thomas Gowan, an Englishman who
had lived in the islands for sometime, published The Manila Times to
meet the demand for an American paper in Manila. The demand, of course,
came mainly from the men of the United States Army who had occupied
Manila.
Gowan hired a small
printing press, Chofre y Compania, to put out the paper. The press was
located on Calle Alix, now Legarda Street in Sampaloc. The paper,
however, had a downtown office on the Escolta.
Maiden issue
The First issue The first
issue of The Manila Times had a sheet of two leaves, or four pages,
measuring about 12 by 8 inches, each page divided into two columns. The
first page was taken up by announcements and advertisements. Page 2 was
the editorial page. It contained the editorials and the more important
news of the day. Page 3 was devoted to cable news from Europe and the
United States all bearing on the Spanish-American War.
The first editorial read:
“Since the United States
forces have been in the Philippines, there has been a keen demand for an
American newspaper here with a daily supply of American news. Several
schemes have been talked about, but we have come to nothing. We have not
talked about The Manila Times but we have been working, and hoped to
complete the arrangements in a few days. Now we have the news of such
importance that we feel compelled to publish it promptly, instead of
holding it back until completion of our plans. The Manila public will
readily see that news in this issue [is] of such a nature as to demand
immediate publication, and to excuse defects in the manner of
publishing. What The manila times lacks in quantity, it makes up in
quality, today at any rate. We have made arrangements for a daily
service of telegrams from the United States, and we undertake to
continue that as long as the public desires. We cannot guarantee to
provide as great a piece of news each day as we give today, for Paris
Conferences do not sit often, and the United States does not acquire
territories every day.”
Factually speaking, the
issue of The Times on October 11, 1898, was not the first. The day
before, a bulletin entitled “The Manila Times” and datelined October
10, 1898, appeared in the streets of Manila. The bulletin carried the
first press cable in English received in the Philippines. It dealt with
the convening of the Paris Conference to end the Spanish-American War.
The Manila Times for a long
time had this motto under its flag: “Pioneer American daily in the Far
East.” Underneath was the claim: “Published every day since 1898.”
The statement was true, and remained so until the paper burned down in
1928. The Manila Times was the first newspaper in the English language
ever published in this part of the world, not excepting China and Japan.
The paper also came out every day of the week and, at a certain period
in its life, had two issues—a noon and an afternoon edition.
Native papers
Before The Times was born,
several native papers were already in existence written in Spanish, and
most of them were nationalistic and revolutionary.
By way of comparison, the
Manila Daily Bulletin was founded on February 1, 1900, by H.G. Farris
and Carson Taylor. The Manila Times had been coming out for nearly a
year and a half before the Bulletin appeared. The Cablenews-American was
the result of a consolidation of the Cablenews and The American in 1908.
The Cablenews appeared in 1902, and was owned and edited by Israel
Putnam, a US Army. The American came out on October 17, 1898, about a
week after The Manila Times appeared, and was published by F.J. Berry
and edited by William Crozier. In or about 1905 the Cablenews was
published and edited by Frederick O’Brien, who later leased it to J.F.
Boomer. O’Brien joined The Manila Times in 1907.
The only American
publications antedating The Manila Times were The Bounding Billow, a
tabloid printed on Admiral Dewey’s flagship Olympia by two sailors
after the destruction of the Spanish fleet; the Official Gazette, an
occupation paper which appeared on August 23, 1898, 10 days after Manila
surrendered to the Americans; and The American Soldier, which came out
on September 10, 1898.
The Bounding Billow had
only one issue devoted to the Battle of Manila Bay. The American Soldier
stopped publication when regular dailies appeared. It lasted about a
month, putting out some 20 issues. The Official Gazette carries its name
to this day, being the official organ of the Philippine government.
In 1899 George Sellner
joined The Manila Times as business manager, and later bought the paper
from Gowan. Apparently Sellner was in the newspaper game not for love of
journalism but for the more profitable financial phase he saw in it. He
sold The Times to a group of American businessmen in 1902 and reacquired
it three years later.
The
Times Co.
Again, in 1907 Sellner sold
the paper to Thomas C. Kinney, who incorporated the Times Co., with a
board of directors composed of American and British businessmen. During
this period R. McCulloch Dick, a British sailor who came to Manila with
the United States Navy and had some newspaper experience, was appointed
editor of The Manila Times. Dick later acquired the Philippines Free
Press, a weekly founded by Judge W.H. Kincaid in 1907, and was joined by
Theo F. Rogers as partner and business manager. The Free Press developed
into one of the largest and most influential weekly papers in the
Philippines. Dick lived most of his life in the Philippines, dying here
at the age of 80 years.
In 1908 Martin Egan, after
gaining fame and a name from his articles in the Saturday Evening Post,
came to the Philippines to become editor of The Times. He had been in
the Philippines as correspondent during the Spanish-American War.
He brought his wife with
him, a literary figure in her own right, and naturally formed part of
The Times staff. Mrs. Eleanor Franklin Egan used to write for Leslie’s
Weekly.
On July 25, 1914, The
Manila Times moved from the Escolta to its new offices at the
Cosmopolitan Building, formerly the Metropolitan Hotel, on the northeast
approach of the Santa Cruz Bridge, now MacArthur Bridge. With its
transfer to a new site The Times modernized its equipment, getting
Linotypes of the latest models, the only ones of their kind then in the
Orient. The use of the new machinery necessitated laying off 27 of the
35 printers, mostly hand typesetters, who had been with the paper since
its founding some 16 years earlier.
A photoengraving system was
installed to make the plant up-to-date and second to none in the islands
in point of equipment. After nearly 10 years working with The Times,
Egan returned to the United States, where, not long after, he joined the
staff of J. Pierpont Morgan, Wall Street banker. Egan became a noted
figure in New York’s financial circles.
Egan was succeeded on The
Times editorial chair by Wilmot H. Lewis, formerly correspondent for the
New York Herald during the Russo-Japanese War, who had joined The Times
in 1911 as a reporter. He did not stay long as editor. While the First
World War was going on he returned to the United States and became a
member of the publicity staff of the US Expeditionary Forces in France.
In 1930 Lewis was knighted
by King George V of England for notable journalistic services regarding
the disarmament conference in Washington. He was then head of the
Washington bureau of the London Times, then reputed to be the largest
newspaper in the world in business and circulation.
A young reporter named
George Culver worked with The Times during Lewis’s editorship. He
returned to the United States and was lost to the world for some time
until his name was heralded in Pacific coast financial circles as the
founder of Culver City, a land development project near Los Angeles,
California. He had done well in the real-estate business.
About the time of Egan and
Lewis, L.H. Thibault, a schoolteacher, started breaking into the
newspaper game by reporting for The Times during summer vacations. He
later resigned his teaching job and eventually became editor of the
paper, but before him Frederick O’Brien, soon to become famous as the
author of South Seas novels, held the editorial chair for some time.
Filipino cub reporters
During the editorship of
Lewis and O’Brien a few Filipino young men embarked on a newspaper
career by beginning as cub reporters. Among them was Victoriano Yamzon,
the first Filipino to be accepted on The Times staff. He had had a brief
newspaper experience, having edited the short-lived English edition of
El Renacimiento, a militant newspaper owned by Martin Ocampo and at that
time edited by Teodoro M. Kalaw. Yamzon later became a successful lawyer
and law professor.
Yamzon was followed by
Cornelio Balmaceda, who was to become director of commerce a few years
after his stint as reporter. He became later the secretary of commerce
and industry and member of the National Economic P. Romulo, who was to
become secretary of education, secretary of foreign affairs, president
of the United Nations General Assembly, ambassador to the United States
and the United Nations, and other high posts in the Philippine foreign
service. Besides his war service during which he attained the rank of
brigadier general, Romulo also held the position of editor in chief of
the T-V-T papers (Tribune-Vanguardia-Taliba) and publisher of the
D-M-H-M newspapers (Debate-Mabuhay-Herald-Monday Mail).
The Manila Times can very
well be proud of its first Filipino “alumni.”
After Romulo, Bernardo P.
Garcia joined The Times staff, covering the more important beats like
Malacañang and the Ayuntamiento, where the department secretaries held
their offices. Garcia had been on the staff of La Vanguardia, a
Spanish-language newspaper, but was proficient in English. In his time
Garcia was considered the best abilingual reporter in Manila, and
probably the highest paid. Many years later he joined the government
service, his last assignment before his retirement being administrative
officer of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
Lewis took in a young
student—Crispin Gonzales—for his shipping page. Gonzales not only
was the waterfront reporter but also covered the Bureau of Customs.
Subsequently Gonzales joined the Philippines Herald, and still later The
Tribune, one of the T-V-T newspapers published before World War II.
After the war he became the shipping editor of The Manila Times, a
position he held until he retired in 1960.
The Times strike
In 1918 the Filipino
employees of The Manila Times called an all-out strike. The Filipino
press had accused The Times of misrepresenting the Filipinos in order to
prejudice the minds of a party of American congressmen, which was then
about to visit the Philippines, against granting of independence.
Smarting from the attempts at misrepresentation, the reporters and
printers of the paper, who were all Filipinos, declared a general
walkout.
Romulo, then a Times
reporter, was reported to be the leader of the strike, but the belief
had gained credence at the time that the movement had been inspired by
Manuel L. Quezon and other Filipino political leaders. The belief was
later supported by two salient facts: First, some of the strikers were
given temporary jobs in the office of Senate President Quezon, and
second, the purchase by Quezon himself of The Manila Times. Not long
after the strike Romulo became one of the secretaries of Quezon,
together with an aspiring young politician named Elpidio Quirino.
Quezon buys The Times
In association with a group
of Filipino businessmen Quezon bought The Manila Times lock, stock and
barrel. He wanted a militant Filipino organ of public opinion, and he
thought that The Times would suit his purpose. Under his ownership the
paper was staffed mostly by Filipinos. This followed the pattern set by
his close friend, Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison, of
Filipinizing the government.
The editorials were written
by a staff composed of Maximo M. Kalaw, Manuel X. Burgos, Vicente M.
Hilario and Bernardo P. Garcia; the business side was managed by Felipe
Buencamino Jr. Gabriel Sucgang, who had been cashier since the days of
Gowan, continued to scrape in the day’s earnings and give chits to
habitually impecunious reporters and editors against their month’s
salaries. Sucgang, after an uninterrupted service of over 20 years, left
The Times in the early days of the Fairchild ownership, but returned to
his old job after Thibault bought the paper for the T-V-T newspapers in
1929.
Quezon, realizing out that
publishing and politics did not mix well, sold The Times to George H.
Fairchild in 1921. Fairchild, a former Hawaiian senator, was then
engaged in promoting the Philippine sugar industry. The new owner
supervised the business as well as the editorial policies of the paper,
and was naturally partial to news bearing on the sugar industry. The
paper under Fairchild was generally believed to have become intensely
pro-American and anti-Filipino in its politics. It took on the role of
spokesman for American business and politics in the Philippines.
In the early days of the
Fairchild ownership, Egan, who had returned to the United States, was
succeeded by John H. Hackett, a pioneer newspaper publisher in Mindanao.
He was editor and general manager, assisted by A.V.H. Hartendorp, a
former schoolteacher, as editorial writer. Later Hartendorp became
editor and Clayton Young, city editor. Young had been with the paper for
sometime as reporter and sports editor. He left the Philippines in 1921
and was not heard of until two years later, when became publicity
manager of the Chicago International Exposition being held at that time.
Hartendorp as editor
When Hartendorp resigned in
1921 to join the Philippine Education Magazine, Walter Q. Wilgus was
contracted as editor. Hartendorp later bought the Philippine Education
Magazine, whose name he changed to Philippine Magazine. Wilgus, a
veteran of the First World War and a journalism graduate, had come to
the Philippines in 1920 to found the School of Journalism at the
University of the Philippines. The school, however, lived only a year,
because after that the Philippine legislature, on account of differences
of opinion with Dr. Guy Potter Benton, president of the state
university, refused to set aside funds for its maintenance.
When Hartendorp was editor
of The Times, the members of the staff, besides Young, who was city
editor, included Bernardo P. Garcia as political reporter; Vicente
Almoalla, Malacañang reporter; Charles “Fat” Freeman, police
reporter; William “Bill the Bosun” Jansen, shipping editor; Emilio
Bautista, waterfront reporter; Antonio Escoda, sports and City Hall
reporter; Cromwell Nash, sports editor; and Anacleto Benavides, sports
reporter. Pedro de la Llana, a member of The Times business staff,
sometimes contributed pungent and caustic articles which raised eyebrows
among Filipino readers. He had edited The Independent, a militant weekly
published by Vicente Sotto, before he came to The Times. Later he was
appointed member of the House of Representatives by Governor General
Leonard Wood. Before the end of World War II he was mistaken by Filipino
guerrillas as a Japanese spy and executed.
Norbert Lyons, former
editor of the Manila Daily Bulletin and the American Chamber of Commerce
Journal, Albert Lawrence, Katherine Bush, Robert Montee, H. F. Stampf,
George Heacock, John V. Tutching and W. “Bart” Bartholomew were also
on the staff of the times at different times. Lyons covered the American
business community, Lawrence and Heacock had the police beat, Montee the
US Army beat and “Bart” wrote sports stories. Montee, after a brief
apprenticeship with The Times, accepted an appointment as correspondent
for a press service.
The
Sakdalan case
Escoda died a hero’s
death in 1944 when he and several companions, including Brig. Gen.
Vicente Lim of the Philippine Army, were captured by Japanese soldiers
while attempting to sail for Mindoro in a sailboat to contact an
American submarine. Benavides died in New York in 1956. He was then
serving the Philippine government as commercial attaché, having
previously retired as editor of the Manila Chronicle. Sakdalan, who died
in 1948, became a sort of newspaperman-hero when he was jailed sometime
before his death for contempt by the Supreme Court for refusing to
divulge the source of a news story he had written. Sakdalan’s brief
imprisonment of inspired Sen. Vicente Sotto, a militant newspaperman
himself in his younger days, to file a bill forbidding newspapermen to
disclose their news sources unless it was “in the interest of the
state.” Later this phrase was amended by another former newspaperman,
Sen. Mariano Jesus Cuenco, to read “unless the security of the state
demanded.”
The late Jose A. Bautista
spent his apprenticeship as a reporter with The Times in the days of
O’Brien. Later he joined the Philippine Herald and The Tribune, and
still later, that is, after World War II, rejoined The Manila Times and
became one of its editors. Generoso K. Liwag, another Tribune staffer,
got his start in the newspaper game with Tthe Times, serving as a
stringer for the sportswriters. He did not live to see the last world
war.
Wilgus
as editor
Wilgus was editor and city
editor at the same time. Under him were Floyd C. Finch, who was sports
editor, and a staff of reporters who were mostly Filipinos including
Juan Reyes, who later became representative and governor of Sorsogon,
Narciso Ramos, former Philippine ambassador to Taiwan and subsequently
secretary of foreign affairs after having served as representative from
Pangasinan, and Antonio Canizares, who was to become an associate
justice of the Court of Appeals. Reyes, Ramos and Canizares served The
Times as court reporters.
Darrel L. Brodt joined The
Times as an army and police reporter, while David T. Boguslav, who came
in at the same time, was a sports writer. The two were technical
sergeants in the US Army detailed as hospital assistants to the
Sternberg General Hospital on Arroceros Street before they joined The
Times. Boguslav eventually became sports editor as Finch moved up to the
city editorship. Emilio Bautista became shipping editor after Jansen’s
departure, and he was assisted by a brother, Abelardo.
Senate investigation
In 1925 a Senate
investigation of the Times, the first of its kind in its history,
perturbed the staff and the publisher. The Times published a story that
an appointive member of the Senate had been acting as a spy for the
governor-general, Leonard Wood. Fairchild, Wilgus, Serrano and some
members of the mechanical department of the paper were summoned to the
questioned under a subpoena ducestecum.
The newspaper’s team led
the senatorial investigators on a merry chase, and The Times played up
the story for several days. Neither Fairchild nor Wilgus knew who wrote
the story, they told the senators. Among the members of the Senate
investigating committee were Jose P. Laurel, Juan B. Alegre, Jose O.
Vera, Claro M. Recto and Elpidio Quirino. The caliber of the probers
could be gauged by the fact that two of them—Laurel and
Quirino—became presidents of the Philippines, while Recto was
considered the greatest constitutional lawyer and foreign affairs expert
of his time.
The efforts of the
investigators to track down the culprint proved fruitless. They never
found out who had written the story, although the chair, Senator
Quirino, tried to pin down Serrano, the regular Senate reporter of The
Times. Several times Quirino did not persue his warned Serrano that he
could be jailed for contempt of the Senate, but threats, because the
Quirino probably remembered that sometime in the past Serrano had
written favorable stories about him. The probe made good newspaper copy,
and The Times made the most of it.
The truth was that the spy
story had been written by a guest reporter, a certain James
Montague-Parker, who immediately took the first boat for Hong Kong on
learning about the investigation. In writing the story, the author had
jumped to the conclusion that since Gen. Jose Alejandrino, of Philippine
revolutionary fame, had accepted an appointment from General Wood as a
senator at large, he was acting as a spy for Wood. In fact, another
senator, Alegre, had referred to Alejandrino as “the representative of
General Wood, “to which Alejandrino’s rejoinder was that the Bicol
senator was a Filipino only because of the accident of birth.” The
statement referred to Alegre’s looks, he being more like a Spaniard
than a Filipino.
Jenkins as manager
In 1926 Fairchild sold The
Times to Jacob Rosenthal, a businessman who was engaged in the
importation and manufacture of shoes. Rosenthal had inherited North W.
Jenkins from the Fairchild management, and retained him as a business
manager of the paper Jenkins had worked The Manila Trading Supply Co., a
firm that imported of machinery. For a time The Times prospered
financially under Jenkins, but later it could not withstand the drain on
its revenue by the publication of two daily editions and several weekly
provincial sections and supplements. The two editions were reduced to
one, and the provincial supplements were abolished.
Besides being as business
manager, Jenkins wrote a daily column entitled “Señores,” which was
very popular among American residents, particularly businessmen. The
articles were later collected in book form. Jenkins resigned in 1927 due
to ill health, and retired to Haight’s Place near Baguio, where he
thought the temperate climate would improve his physical condition. He
died there about a year after.
The paper did not fare well
under Rosenthal although after Jenkins’ departure the publisher placed
a man of his choice to look after the business side. The man was W.
Schrameck, Rosenthal’s manager in the shoe business. The paper
continued in a precarious financial state, and the owner began looking
for a new editor. Wilgus having returned to the United States, Rosenthal
secured the service of Hamilton Johnson, city editor of the Manila Daily
Bulletin, as editor of The Times. Johnson brought over Abelardo J.
Valencia, of the Bulletin staff, with him. After about two years with
The Times Valencia left for the United States to join the staff of the
Philippine Press Bureau in Washington, D.C.
Johnson as editor
Johnson inaugurated three
columns in the paper which added popularity to it, especially since they
were directed at advertising clients who were flattered by the frequent
mention of their names in the columns. These columns were Bernardo P.
Garcia’s “As I See It,” A.L. Valencia’s “Around the Town”
and Mario Mariano’s “Mere Habla,” a humorous presentation of life
in Manila in the late twenties.
Destroyed by fire
On December 10, 1928, the
Cosmopolitan Building, in which The Times had been housed for nearly two
decades, burned down. Rosenthal, who had learned to consider the paper a
sort of white elephant, gladly collected the insurance and sold the
paper’s name and goodwill—they were all that were left to sell—to
the T-V-T papers through D.H. Thibault, who, after an absence of about
10 years, had returned to the Philippines to become general manager of
the T-V-T publications of Don Alejandro Roces Sr.
Immediately after the fire
in which The Times was reported (by other papers) to have lost P200,000,
the paper, accepting the hospitality proferred by its contemporaries,
printed its first issue after the fire at the Bulletin plant on
Evangelista and Raon streets. The Times and the Bulletin had been
next-door neighbors for a long time in the Cosmopolitan Building before
the Bulletin moved to its Evangelista quarters.
A few days after the fire,
The Times moved to the Philippine Herald’s quarters in the Walled
City, where it continued publication until negotiations for its purchase
had been arranged by Thibault, who transferred the paper to the T-V-T
building on Florentino Torres Street. Johnson remained editor, Brodt
became city editor, Boguslav sports editor and Garcia, Serrano, Valencia
and Marcelo Victoriano, a cub reporter, staff members. Escoda, in the
meantime, had transferred to the Bulletin, where he eventually became
city editor.
Victoriano was later
shifted to the staff of the sister paper, The Tribune, where he became
one of the best police reporters that paper had ever had. His death in
early youth was a great loss to the newspaper community.
Soon after The Times’
change of ownership, Johnson returned to the United States due to ill
health, and the paper had to crawl along with a crippled staff. Brodt
was advanced to the editorship, Boguslav became city editor and Garcia,
besides reporting, wrote editorials. Brodt did not stay long as editor,
having accepted a more promising job with the Philippine Herald, later
becoming its advertising manager.
After Brodt’s departure
the editor’s chair was given to Boguslav. He was next in line and
highly deserved the promotion. It was not a mere employer-employee
relationship that existed between Thibault, the general manager, and
Boguslav, the editor. It was more than that. Boguslav was Thibault’s
son-in-law, having married Thibault’s daughter Ruth.
Publication discontinued
On February 15, 1930,
Thibault announced that The Manila Times would discontinue publication
on March 15, 1930. On March 14 The Times’ “Swan Song” editorial
appeared. On that date The Times closed the first epoch of its eventful
history after an uninterrupted existence of nearly 32 years, which
covered a period of great political changes not only in the Philippines
but throughout the Far East.
The second epoch in the
history of The Manila Times began 15 years after its discontinuance in
1930 and when World War II was still in its mopping-up stage. Japan had
not yet surrendered, although it was ready to do so.
People had come down from
their mountain refuge, and Manila residents who had evacuated to the
provinces to avoid the horrors of the Occupation began to return in
numbers to their native city. The war had left very few habitable houses
in Manila, but the returning evacuees had to make the best of a
miserable situation. With the returning population, the need for
adequate reading matter was generally felt in the city. A few
enterprising people started printing small newspapers from salvaged
presses and little capital. Among these post-Liberation papers were the
Manila Post, the Philippine Liberty News and the Manila Chronicle.
The heirs of Don Alejandro
Roces Sr., who died during the war along with his eldest son Alejandro
Jr., met together and decided to revive the business their father had
founded. The printing plant of one of them had not been destroyed by the
war. A newspaper could be printed there if newsprint were available.
Accordingly, arrangements were made for a supply of newsprint.
The postwar Times
At that time Boguslav, who
had joined the war correspondents attached to the United States Army
after his release from the Santo Tomas Internment Camp early in
February, was in Manila covering the liberated city for the Chicago Sun
and other American papers. He was asked to revive the English-language
newspaper of the T-V-T chain of newspapers. The Tribune was the prewar
daily newspaper in English, but its resurrection was thumbed down
because of the bad taste it might have left as a result of its continued
publication during the Occupation under the management of Japanese
overlords. They had paid P2 million in “Mickey Mouse” money for the
entire T-V-T plant, an amount the owners had to accept under the
circumstances. The purchase price in the form of a check was never used,
and the liberators of Manila found it framed and in the same condition
as when it was issued.
The T-V-T management
decided on using the name of The Manila Times instead of The Tribune,
The Times having been a member, although only for a brief period, of the
T-V-T chain before the war. Besides, Boguslav had worked for many years
with The Times before it was discontinued in 1930.
In the meantime, the owners
of the paper discarded the old T-V-T name and formed a corporation under
the title of “The Manila Times Publishing Co., Inc.”
The first issue of the
paper on May 27, 1945, carried the name The Sunday Times, and it was
only a small folded sheet of the ordinary tabloid size reminiscent of
the dimensions of the first issue of The Manila Times on October 11,
1898. Then as The Times approached normalcy The Sunday Times increased
its pages. In the meantime the circulation was getting larger, and it
became evident that The Sunday Times alone would not adequately supply
the demand of the reading public. So on September 5, 1945, the first
daily issue of The Manila Times reappeared on the streets of Manila.
The Manila Times was
“resurrected” 15 years and six months after its “demise” on
March 14, 1930. The paper at first occupied the Ramon Roces Publications
Building on Soler and Calero streets, which had not been much damaged by
the war, but later it moved to the T-V-T Building on Florentino Torres
Street after the building had been repaired.
Postwar staff
Among the first staff
members of the postwar Times, besides Boguslav, were Jose P. Bautista,
prewar editor of The Tribune, Jose Luna Castro and Emilio Aguilar Cruz,
staff members of the prewar Graphic, Vicente J. Guzman, formerly of the
Bulletin staff, Luis Serrano, Crispin Gonzales, Anatolio Litonjua,
Andres B. Callanta, Jose L. Guevara, Benjamin Osias and Zosimo
Resurreccion. Guzman covered the House of Representatives, Serrano the
Senate, Calanta Labor, Osias City Hall and Gonzales handled the shipping
page. Later Guevara took over the House beat from Guzman, who was given
a desk job, and Resurreccion succeeded Callanta in the labor beat when
he resigned. Litonjua got the army beat.
Among those who served as
society editor were Jim Austria, Carole Guerrero, Rosario Delgado,
Jovita Rodas, Estrella Alfon, Cita Trinidad and Consuelo G. Abaya.
Later a teenager joined The
Times as a cub reporter, covering the police and miscellaneous beats. He
made such a good showing that the editor of the paper decided to send
him to Korea as its correspondent. His dispatches from the Korean
battlefront were quite creditable, coming as they did from the actual
firing line assigned to the Filipino contingent. He was wounded in Korea
and had to be sent back to the Philippines. He was later assigned to the
army beat.
This young man was Benigno
Aquino Jr.
Another Times staffer who
attained eminence in public life was Mrs. Maria Kalaw-Katigbak. She was
a columnist of the paper before she went into politics. Her column
was highly appreciated by the reading public, especially by women whose
views and opinions generally found expression in the column.
Boguslav, after serving
with The Manila Times for 27 years, excluding the war years when he was
in an internment camp, and the 15-year period when The Times lay in
inanimate suspension, died in Manila in 1962 at the age of 67. At the
time of his death he was the oldest staff member of The Times in point
of service, and the only editor of the paper who died in the
Philippines, which he had made his home and whose government in 1960
awarded him the Legion of Honor for his service to Philippine
journalism.
Martial law
On Saturday, September 23,
1972, Manila woke up with nary a newspaper in sight. The night before,
President Ferdinand Marcos had imposed martial law throughout the
country, although the declaration was antedated September. 21. The
Manila Times was one of the media organizations closed down by the
imposition of authoritarian government. It was to remain closed
down—as would a number of other media outlets—for the next 14 years.
Roces family reopens The Times
On February 5, 1986, days
before Edsa I that ousted Marcos, the Roces family (the Ramon Roces
group) revived The Manila Times.
Sheila Coronel, former
Times reporter and now executive director of the Philippine Center for
Investigative Journalism, recalled that the Roces family had hired some
refugees from the Marcos-controlled press like her, Lorna Kalaw-Tirol
and Malou Mangahas, who was to become editor in chief of The Times, to
staff the new paper.
Coronel and her fellow
reporters kept vigil through the four nights of Edsa 1, covering events
during the day and rushing to the office at night to file their reports.
She wrote: “Don Chino was
often there, watching protectively over us and going out of his way to
bring us food. If memory serves, I think it was Max’s fried chicken
and the occasional burger. But it was not the food that was memorable.
It was that Don Chino himself went around the newsroom to give each of
us dinner.”
Coronel said if there was
something that Roces instilled in them when they were still young and
impressionable, it was humility.
Roces treated everyone the
same way, whether editor, reporter or copy boy. To him, in the newsroom,
all were equal: Everyone did what they could to bring out the next
day’s paper. There was no need for an exaggerated sense of
self-importance.
Three years after its
rebirth, the Roces family, citing financial dearth, sold the paper to
the business tycoon John Gokongwei.
Estrada sues The Times, Gokongweis apologize
The Manila Times under the
Estrada presidency was a paper under siege.
When The Times published a
story calling the former movie actor an “unwitting godfather” to a
supposed fraudulent deal, Estrada sued The Times for P101 million.
Terrorized by Estrada’s
wrath, the Gokongweis were forced to apologize to stop him from
harassing them on their alleged tax problems.
The printed apology
prompted Estrada to withdraw the libel case. The Times publisher Ermin
Garcia Jr. pointed out that the paper did not retract the story that
drew Estrada’s ire.
On July 23, 1999, the
nation’s most trusted newspaper closed up.
The 180 employees of The
Times mourned the demise of the paper which had been critical of the
Estrada administration. Clad in black, The Times workers posted banners
in the newsroom that said “Defend Press Freedom.”
In an earlier interview,
the editor in chief, Malou Mangahas, said the purchase of the paper by a
group headed by the businessman Reghis Romero 3rd was part of an effort
to stifle newspapers that were critical of the government.
The Times under Mark Jimenez
Months before The Times’
closure, Mark Jimenez, an Estrada crony, was said to have already shown
interest in buying the paper but wanted to remain an undisclosed
partner.
Reports said Jimenez even
paid a visit to John Gokongwei as early as April 1999.
A member of Estrada’s
inner circle confirmed that Jimenez indeed bought The Manila Times.
But Jimenez’s wish to be
an unidentified buyer would be granted. From October 11 until November,
The Times was operating under its supposed owner Romero, who reportedly
fronted for Jimenez.
In the last week of
December, after a series of critical stories against Estrada’s
friends, the lawyer Katrina Legarda, who was also editor in chief, went
public claiming she was being pressured by The Times owners regarding
editorial policies and which story should get published.
Just before the millennium,
10 Times editors resigned, citing increasing pressure from the owners.
Legarda followed suit.
Eventually, Jimenez
admitted ownership of the paper before the May 14 election.
Dante Ang and his vision for The Times
On August 8 Dante A. Ang
formally sat as publisher and chair of The Manila Times.
Ang promised to give news
that is accurate, fair and comprehensive.
He’s also proud of The
Times’ Opinion Page, which he said is more ruminative and reflective,
delving more deeply into the meaning of the news and into the motive of
those who make the news.
In particular, Ang said The
Times would publish enterprise-driven investigative stories. The Times
would also honor its rich heritage and snoop into the future, Ang said.
He said he would be aided by a strong editorial, advertising and
production staff who have a high degree of professionalism and
experience that honor the ethics of the trade.
The Times, under its new
owner Dante Ang, will capitalize on its rich and illustrious—if
tumultuous—history since 1898.
Ang’s vision is to make
The Times “handsomely profitable” as well as one of the top
influential dailies in the country.
He is no stranger to
newspapering. He published Money Asia, a business magazine, and founded
the Filipino broadsheet Kabayan. He also maintains five publishing
houses and is president and chair of a public relations firm that
handles corporate accounts.
The Times will also put a
premium on enterprise stories, solid political and business reporting,
and investigative exposés.
“Watch us as we grow,
keep us company as members of the family,” Ang said.
(This updated article
was based mainly on the History of the Manila Times by Luis Serrano.)
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