Eugenia Apostol - Mr & Ms Special Edition

Mr & Ms Special Edition

On August 21, 1983, opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. was assassinated upon his arrival from exile in the United States. Though the funeral drew over two million people, it was ignored by the media. In a recorded interview, Apostol described her reaction: "Next day, I said: “What’s this? Not a single photo of the funeral in the papers, as if nothing happened. What really got me was the Times Journal - owned by Benjamin Romualdez, brother of Mrs. Imelda Marcos. What they printed was the photo of the spectator who was hit by lightning — that was their top news!"

A Time magazine article that hailed Apostol as an Asian hero, described what she did next: "Apostol fumed. Within days she was printing a tabloid version of her glossy Mr. & Ms. called Mr & Ms Special Edition. It had 16 pages of photographs showing Aquino's body, the multitudes that came to view it, and the massive funeral parade that wound through the streets of Manila for almost 12 hours. The first run was some half a million copies, yet it could not satisfy demand. In the coming months, as momentum built for the People Power revolution that would topple Marcos three years later, Apostol turned the tabloid into a weekly endeavor, putting it out from a raggedy office that, for security reasons, did not even have the publication's name on the door."

Apostol had instructed her staff to put out a special report on Aquino in the September 2, 1983 issue of Mr. & Ms. as well as a "special edition" sixteen-page supplement about the funeral. The supplement sold 750,000 copies and had a significant impact in arousing public anger at the dictatorship.

She launched the weekly Mr. & Ms. Special Edition, with journalist Letty Jimenez Magsanoc as editor. The special edition’s masthead declared its commitment to “justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of the Aquino assassination.”

The public response to the forty-page, black-and-white weekly was described as "phenomenal". Sales rose from two hundred thousand to half-a-million copies, numbers unprecedented in the country. The appearance of the publication was a high moment in the campaign against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Ferdinand Marcos was toppled by a popular uprising known as the People Power Revolution in 1986.