TOUGH AND SHARP
The man behind the success story called BizNewsAsia, the largest business weekly
Tony Lopez is the founder, president, chairman and CEO of BizNewsAsia, the Philippines’ largest and most influential weekly business and news magazine. Its pass-on circulation is as high as 350,000 readers.
Tony is one of the most senior and prominent journalists in the country today. He has 50 years of journalism experience here and abroad covering business, the economy, politics, and world affairs.
He has worked for the largest, oldest and premium news organizations here and abroad, including Asiaweek of Time Warner, Mainichi Shimbun of Japan, ARD and ZRD TV stations of Germany, and the Roces Manila Times. In 2001, he put up his own magazine, BizNewsAsia.
Tony began his business journalism in 1970, becoming senior business reporter of the Manila Chronicle, acting business editor of the Manila Times, and business editor of The Times Journal.
As a business writer of nearly 50 years, and editor of BizNewsAsia weekly, he has interacted with and interviewed many of the Philippines’ leading tycoons and taipans. He thus can write about them and their enterprises with urgency, immediacy and authority, as well as with balance, fairness and sympathy.
Lopez is the first honorary member of CREBA, the largest and most prestigious association of developers, builders, property owners and real estate professionals. He is a governor of PHILCONSA and current chairman of Manila Overseas Press Club.
His BizNewsAsia is remarkable for its incisive and in-depth reporting on business and the economy and for chronicling the achievements of the country’s leading enterprises and entrepreneurs.
Lopez writes a column, Virtual Reality, every Wednesday and Friday for Manila Standard and hosted for nearly six years the award-winning business-oriented weekly PTV talk show BizNewsTV.
Tony finished journalism, magna cum laude, from the University of Santo Tomas, on a four-year full scholarship. He also finished global journalism from the University of Stockholm, Sweden and three semesters of MBA at Ateneo de Manila.
He was for 25 years senior correspondent of Time Warner’s Hong Kong-based weekly Asiaweek. He made Asiaweek the largest international news magazine in the Philippines.
His Asiaweek work helped put the Philippines on the world map, writing on events that shaped one of Asia’s largest economies in population and economic size, both during its moment of great peril during the martial law years and its re-emergence as a bastion of democracy, economic revival and good governance today.
Lopez won the TOYM in 1985 for international journalism, the Outstanding Manilan in 1989 for international journalism, and the Gold Medal as Hero of EDSA from the Philippine Star in 1987. The Pilipino Reporter Magazine made him “Journalist of the Year”. The Rotary Club of Manila has given him six awards — for distinguished foreign correspondence in 1987, for lifetime achievements in journalism in 2015, and for BizNewsAsia as the “Business Magazine of the Year” in 2015 and 2016, “Journalist of the Year” and “Centennial Journalist of the Year” 2019.
The UST College of Arts and Letters made him one of its Most Outstanding Alumni in Arts and Letters in the last 100 years. UST itself made him one of its Most Outstanding Thomasians in the field of arts and letters.
Tony is a founding member of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, long-time member of the National Press Club, and the only six-time president of the Manila Overseas Press Club, Asia’s oldest press club.