Asia-Pacific Insights officially launches
Asia-Pacific Insights (API) has officially launched to the public during the event celebrating the second edition release of “It’s Me, Bok!"
Asia-Pacific Insights editor-in-chief and “It’s Me, Bok!” author Manuel Mogato delivers an opening speech during the official launch on Wednesday, August 20, 2025. Photo by Rio Deluvio.
By: Anna Mogato | Published: August 22, 2025
MANILA — Asia-Pacific Insights (API) has officially launched to the public during the event celebrating the second edition release of “It’s Me, Bok!“, the memoir of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Manuel Mogato, on Wednesday, August 20, 2025 at Marco Polo Hotel Ortigas in Pasig City.
The biweekly online publication, which specializes in delivery cutting-edge analysis on security issues, is also headed by Mogato, who serves as its editor-in-chief. API’s resident contributors are former intelligence officer and West Point graduate Colonel Dencio Acop, and former ABS-CBN editor and veteran defense reporter Rodney Jaleco.
“Old journalist do not retire from active reporting, we reinvent, retool, and resurrect for factful, truthful story telling. We also find a niche market,” Mogato said in his speech.
“So, please like, share, and leave comments on our platform. But more importantly, please subscribe or make generous donations to good journalism. We are a vanishing tribe but you can help us stay afloat.”
After retiring from active journalism in 2019, Mogato now serves as the defense and diplomacy editor for Cignal TV’s One News and is an adjunct instructor at the University of Santo Tomas’s Department of Journalism. He is also a columnist for PressOne.ph.
Click photos to enlarge
Philippine Defense Secretary, Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr., who graced the event as the guest of honor, highlighted the need for a comprehensive guide for future practitioners covering the defense beat.
“That’s why I asked from Manny [Mogato] to take decisions that were made in the defense and security sphere in the proper context, to take into account certain circumstances of why a decision was a made at one time and this is lost. We do not have it. There is no institutional memory for a lot of things we need to do and it really needs an important decision to make,” Teodoro said in his speech.
“Providing that context is something Manny and the rest of the journalists can do, which is really important…So that practitioners in the future can look back and objectively analyze where we went wrong, what we should have done, what we shouldn’t have done.”
Mogato’s memoir, “It’s me, Bok!” chronicles his 40-year long journalism career of covering conflicts, disasters, political upheavals, as well as ASEAN and APEC summits and ministerial meetings.