Locsin necrological rites today

Necrological services will be held today for veteran journalist Raul Locsin, publisher and editor-in-chief of BusinessWorld.

Locsin is highly regarded as the country’s pioneer in business reporting. His standards of accurate reportage, fairness and writing quality are legendary.

During the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship, Locsin’s standard of accurate reporting helped BusinessDay keep its independence amid an era of disinformation — and even outlive the regime.

Ironically, it was a strike that shut down BusinessDay in 1987.

But it didn’t take Locsin long to be back in circulation, founding BusinessWorld in the same year with a core of loyal employees. And he ran BusinessWorld the way he ran BusinessDay.

Locsin was likewise known for his ethical standards. In the 1990s, PLDT threatened to pull out its ads over a story they didn’t like.

But Locsin, who let his reporters tell it the way they saw it, told PLDT to go ahead. After several months it was the telecommunications giant that surrendered.

When then President Joseph Estrada sued The Manila Times in 1999 over a story over his alleged involvement in a power plant project, Locsin was among the first to defend the beleaguered daily and the role of press freedom in a society.

"All our rights remain meaningless and defenseless without it," he wrote in an editorial.

That same year, Locsin’s life-long contribution to press freedom earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature and creative communication arts — considered as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

If there was anything Locsin was known for, it was "his love for the written word," a former BusinessWorld reporter summed it up as a tear streamed down her face.

Locsin died last Saturday at St. Luke’s hospital in Quezon City after a long illness. He was 72. He is survived by six children and his wife Leticia, his paper’s executive editor and chief operating officer.

The necrological service will be held at his alma mater Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City at 5:30 p.m. — Norman Sison