The Manila Mail is happy announced that Juan Johnny L. Mercado, a multi-awarded journalist who now writes columns for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Cebu Daily News, Sun-Star Cebu and its syndicated members, Bohol Chronicle and other community publications, will be writing regular Notebook columns for the Mail starting next month.
A graduate of San Carlos University in Cebu and Ateneo de Manila, he trained at the American Press Institute in Columbia University, and was a Kissinger Fellow at Harvard University.
During his journalistic career, he became
associate editor of the Evening News in Manila and later covered the United
Nations in New York and served as correspondent of various foreign
publications.
Mercado later became the founding
director of the Philippine Press Institute, an organization of newspaper
publishers in the Philippines, and later editor of DEPTHnews, a
publication of the Magsaysay Foundation of Asia. It was during his stint at PPI
that he picked Bert Alfaro (of the Manila Chronicle and now editor of Manila
Mail) and Noli Jara (of Evening News) to be the first Filipino journalists to
attend the three-month course at the Berlin Institute for Mass Communication in
West Berlin, when Germany was still a divided country.
Like other journalists, he was
incarcerated during martial law. After the ouster of Marcos, the United Nations
posted him in Thailand and thereafter in Italy. After 19 years of UN service,
Mercado returned to the Philippines to resume journalism work.
The Manila Rotary Club named Mercado
“Journalist of the Year” in 1968 and “Opinion Writer of the Year” in 2004. San
Carlos University selected him as “Outstanding Alumnus in Journalism.”
He was cited for opinion writing by
Society of Publishers in Asia editorial excellence awards, given a 2005 award
by the Catholic Archdiocesan Commission for Mass Media as well as by the
Province of Cebu.
