Are the 12 people captured in these following portraits heroes?  Some of you might disagree, but most of you probably won’t.  This issue is devoted to sticking a thermometer up our country’s bum and finding out just how sick we really are.  There are many diseases in our society, and these people appear to have made some serious and successful attempts at curing them.  For this reason, we are featuring them in our first annual Honor Roll portfolio, an homage to the men and women who have helped uplift our crippled nation in their own unique-and sometimes misunderstood-way.  By doing this we recognize and applaud their actions which have directly confronted our nation’s most pressing problems.  The selection of the honorees was a long and well-researched process, involving a de facto committee of thinkers and patriots who brought their heads together and came up with a short list of people who have taken huge strides towards the betterment of our nation.  This isn’t a canonization; just an honest gesture of thanking these people for what they’ve done.  Nobody’s perfect, especially when you’re serving an entire country-but in Rogue’s humble opinion, these warriors have left some tracks.

MARITES VITUG
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, NEWSBREAK MAGAZINE 
Photographed by Steve Tirona outside the Newsbreak office in Quezon City on May 5, 2008

Marites Danguilan Vitug is the kind of journalist who effectively reminds her male colleagues that tough, streetsmart journalism isn’t about packing guns or talking like they’d swallowed all 444 pages of The Godfather. (She also reminds female colleagues that you don’t have to be a butch or a vamp to get good stories.) Recently appointed editor-in-chief of abs-cbnnews.com, she has also been EIC for eight years running of the hard-hitting Newsbreak magazine (on which I’ve served as editorial consultant and Marites’s co-respondent, among many others, in the libel case a certain FG filed against us). Vitug is a reporter’s dream to work for and a wrongdoer’s nightmare to work against. She was a freelance investigative reporter in 1987-1988 when she started writing articles about the environment—in particular, the ravaging of the Philippines’ last tropical rain forest. In 1993, she expanded them into the book The Politics of Logging: Power From The Forest, and was awarded a National Book Award. In 1993, only a few months into the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos, she co-wrote (with Glenda Gloria) an expose in The Philippine Daily Inquirer about socialite Baby Arenas’s “unofficial power” or influence peddling in the new regime, which caused much controversy. In 2000, she co-founded Newsbreak, an investigative magazine that was mainly funded by civic-minded businessmen, grants from foundations, and through the efforts of the journalists themselves. “She’s probably the only journo I know whose default mode is ‘assume good faith’ in people,” says her longtime friend and collaborator, Glenda Gloria. “I think that’s kept her grounded and sane, less cynical of the world despite all the investigations made by Newsbreak. She’s very honest, has a tough time telling even a white lie.” While other editors grow fat and pontificate, Vitug keeps trim by jogging, eating healthy, and pounding away at news stories just like any of the people who work with her.

By Butch Dalisay

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