tabloid during martial law, he splashed the photograph of the multitude that attended Ninoy’s funeral, an event buried in the inside pages of all the other newspapers. Later he would revive the Manila Times during the Edsa Revolution of 1986. As the Marcos soldiers were only blocks away from its office in Quezon City, and poised to do a takeover, Vergel had the reckless courage to confront the publisher demanding to know if the paper, indeed, had Marcos crony money in it. Now imagine yourself standing (in the literal sense as well) by this man almost every day of those years—close to two decades. Somehow, sometime, something of the man’s skills, perspective, values and vision had to rub off on you. Even if only by proxim- ity I was blessed in that sense. I had to be really pretty dumb not to have learned anything from that exposure and daily interaction (a foot on my computer table, remember), but then I wasn’t really that dumb. To this day I still see much of my craft and profession from a Vergel Santos perspective. To this day, I still care whether what I do, write and produce would meet his standards. I managed to detach myself from him only when I opened the glossy magazines ( Metro, Food, StarStudio ) for Benpres Publishing, later to be known as ABS-CBN Publishing. But we have kept in touch, and time and again, he would nudge me on, assuring me I was on the right track, because niche publishing was the way to go, and media was being segmentized into various target markets.
Pulse of market—that was the valuable learning I got from Vergel, which stood me well as I crossed over from editorship to
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