The Philippine Star

• 1. Introduction

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  The Philippine Star was born on the 28th of July 1986, seven months after a popular uprising drove a dictator from power. Its first issue had eight pages, no advertisements, and a headline that read "Wear yellow and die." That story covered the killing of a 23-year-old named Stephen Salcedo, a bystander beaten to death by a Marcos loyalist mob at Manila's Luneta Park. It was a newspaper that arrived into a country still shaking from revolution, founded by journalists who had spent years writing against a regime that tried to silence them. How did three veterans of the underground press build one of the Philippines' most widely read newspapers? And what happened to their creation once a telecommunications giant came knocking?

• 2. Children of the Mosquito Press

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  Betty Go-Belmonte, Max Soliven, and Art Borjal came up through what Philippine journalists called the "Mosquito Press" - a loose network of newspapers that buzzed with criticism of Ferdinand Marcos during and after the Martial Law era, which ran from 1972 to 1981. Belmonte herself had already been running a small monthly magazine called The Star, which would give the new paper both its name and its origins.

  On the 9th of December 1985, just months before the revolution that would change everything, this same trio helped found the Philippine Daily Inquirer alongside Eugenia Apostol, Louie Beltran, and Florangel Rosario-Braid. That paper became the loudest press critic of the Marcos administration. But after Marcos fell and Corazon Aquino took power, the Inquirer's founders found themselves arguing over money and direction. The falling-out was enough to send Belmonte, Soliven, and Borjal off to start something new entirely.

• 3. A Paper Built From Nothing

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  Antonio Roces stepped in as the first editor-in-chief when The Philippine Star launched, holding the position until his resignation in 1989. Belmonte took the role of founding chairman of the Board of Directors; Soliven became publisher and chairman of the editorial board. They set their masthead motto as "Truth Shall Prevail," a direct statement of editorial philosophy that pushed back against what they described as the "scoop mentality" of Philippine journalism at the time.

  The first issue cost readers 1.75 Philippine pesos and was printed at Philstar Daily Inc.'s press in the Port Area of Manila. The blue and yellow color scheme on that first edition became the paper's permanent visual identity. Print runs started at a few thousand copies. Because Belmonte refused work on Sundays, the paper ran Monday through Saturday only in its earliest days. To fill the Sunday gap without violating that rule, Philstar Daily launched Starweek on the 15th of February 1987 as a Sunday magazine. By 1988, demand for Sunday news coverage had grown enough that the paper added a full Sunday edition while keeping Starweek in print.

• 4. Milestones and Leadership Shifts

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  Betty Go-Belmonte died from cancer on the 28th of January 1994, and the newspaper's character changed with her death. Soliven absorbed her board chairmanship while staying on as publisher. He brought in Belmonte's son Miguel, then 30 years old, as executive vice president. That same year, the paper adopted a new slogan: "The only paper you read from cover to cover."

  On the 4th of August 1995, The Philippine Star became the first Philippine broadsheet to publish a colored front page. Three years later, in 1998, the Board of Directors unanimously made Miguel Belmonte president and CEO. The paper then introduced "Hotline 2000" in 1999, which used SMS text messaging to conduct opinion polls, putting The Philippine Star ahead of other Philippine print outlets in what would become known as televoting. In 2000, the newspaper launched philstar.com, making it one of the first Philippine newspapers with a dedicated web presence. That same year the company moved to computer-to-plate printing, and Miguel's brother Isaac Belmonte was named editor-in-chief.

• 5. Expansion and Acquisitions

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  A partnership with Jollibee in 2003 gave The Philippine Star an unusual distribution channel: complimentary copies handed out to customers who bought a breakfast meal at Jollibee locations across the Philippines. It was the first time a Philippine newspaper was distributed free inside a fast food chain.

  On the 24th of August 2004, the paper added The Freeman to its holdings, a Cebu City broadsheet established on the 10th of May 1919, making it the longest-running broadsheet in that city. The deal also brought in Banat, a Cebuano-language tabloid first published on the 23rd of August 1994. Both papers had been owned by the Gullas political family. Then in 2015, The Philippine Star acquired a 76.67 percent stake in BusinessWorld, a business-focused newspaper, as part of a strategy to consolidate its position in the Philippine newspaper market.

• 6. The MediaQuest Takeover

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  Max Soliven died in Tokyo, Japan, on the 24th of November 2006, removing the last of the paper's three founding editors from the operation. Isaac Belmonte eventually stepped into his roles as publisher and chairman of the editorial board in 2012. That same year, former executive editor Ana Marie Pamintuan, also known as Amy, took over as editor-in-chief.

  Meanwhile, businessman and PLDT chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan had been eyeing the paper since at least 2009. The vehicle he used was MediaQuest Holdings, a conglomerate subsidized by the PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund. MediaQuest picked up a 20 percent stake in The Philippine Star around 2010, and also took an 18 percent stake in the rival Philippine Daily Inquirer. By March 2014, MediaQuest had acquired a majority stake of 51 percent in Philstar Daily, Inc., giving it formal control of the paper. The Belmonte family held onto a 21 percent stake and retained both management and editorial oversight. Pangilinan, who chairs MediaQuest, appointed lawyer Ray Espinosa as chairman of the newspaper's board. Philstar.com, which had begun as a digital archive of the print edition, had by then developed its own separate editorial team and began producing independent journalism as early as 2009 under a distinct corporate entity, Philstar Global Corp.