Wilson Lee Flores - Journalistic Career

Journalistic Career

The first articles of Flores outside school newspapers were two political and opinion pieces published by the Catholic Church-owned Veritas which came out after the 1983 assassination of former opposition Senator Ninoy Aquino. The articles were about age-old tradition of youth idealism and activism in times of political tumult, another article was about the anti-colonial rebel chief General Macario Sakay in the early 20th century, and another piece on politics delving on Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine Empire and his controversial Empress Theodora (the Philippines was then under President Ferdinand Marcos and his First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos).

Flores had written the weekly "Roots of Philippine Business" columns for the Manila Chronicle while still in college in the mid-1980s, and all of these were translated into the Chinese language and published first by the Chinese Commercial News and later by the World News. In the mid-1980s to 1989, he also wrote feature articles, book reviews and movie reviews for the Philippine Star newspaper and also Manila Chronicle.

He later wrote business features for the Business Star newspaper and the Philippine Daily Inquirer. In 1989, he also once wrote a guest column on tycoons for the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review" and a cover story for the Hong Kong-based "Asia Magazine". In the 1990s, he was also Philippine correspondent for the Hong Kong-based Chinese-language Forbes magazine affiliated with the U.S. business magazine.

In 2001, he was invited to write to write for the Philippine Star in the Business Life section, with his Monday column, Bull Market, Bull Sheet. On Sundays, his column in the same newspaper known as Will Soon Flourish (rhymes with his name Wilson Flores) deals with diverse topics from humor, features, interviews, satire, movie reviews, social or political commentaries to interviews but all consistently reflect his upbeat and positive thinking attitude.

He is also Philippines correspondent for 'Yazhou Zhoukan (translated as "Asia Weekly") magazine, the Hong Kong-based international Chinese-language newsweekly and affiliated with the Ming Pao newspaper group. He is member of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) and in October 2006 was elected director of the Philippine Chinese Columnists Association (PCCA).

In September 2008, Wilson Lee Flores was invited by the Mega Publishing Group to be the new Editor-in-Chief of its glossy entertainment monthly called S magazine. He and his new editorial team started with the October 2008 issue, beginning a process of decisively changing the logo, the look, the lay-out, editorial style and other features of this magazine. As editor-in-chief, he prefers to focus on team effort and is privileged to work with a highly-motivated and talented editorial team. He told his team that their goals with "S magazine" is to come out with a fun, innovative, comprehensive, intelligent and high-quality entertainment magazine that shall hopefully help expand the frontiers of reading in Philippine society, or using the popular showbiz magazine as an instrument to propagate more the habit of reading nationwide in the Philippines. Hot showbiz features, fearless analyses, scoops and lifestyles of the stars are presented with the highest standards of journalism, these are the aspirations of the "S magazine" editorial team led by Wilson Lee Flores. S magazine has since been reinvented, changed and circulation sales have hit records. The December 2009 to January 2010 issue of "S magazine" had been sold-out three times nationwide, and the publisher had to reprint. The magazine has been rebranded since January 2011 as the Inside Showbiz magazine and has grown in nationwide circulation and advertising revenues.

Books: His political analysis article on the presidency of Corazon C. Aquino at the Manila Chronicle was later published in former University of the Philippines President Dr. Jose Abueva's book about this political leader. The late scholar Dr. Doreen Fernandez of the Ateneo de Manila University also invited him to contribute to the Kasaysayan Philippine encyclopedia. De La Salle University Press then led by scholar Dr. Isagani Cruz had also commissioned him to author five bestselling books for college students on the biographies of five Philippine tycoons.

Literary works : Wilson Lee Flores is a poet and has been published in literary journals and book anthologies, mainly for his poems in English and Filipino languages. The publications include the Caracoa led by the Philippine Literary Arts Council of Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Alfred "Krip" Yuson and others, also the Midweek magazine edited by top poet Jose F. Lacaba, and Ateneo de Manila University's Heights and Matanglawin, also a literary anthology book edited by Cornell University graduate and Kyoto University faculty Dr. Caroline Hau.