(Photo lifted from East-West Center)
MANILA – President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has appointed veteran journalist and book author Renato “Rene” Acosta as the new head of the National Printing Office (NPO), an attached agency of the Presidential Communications Office (PCO).
Acosta’s designation as the new director of the government’s official printing arm was announced Saturday by the Office of Press Secretary Cheloy Velicaria-Garafil.
He will replace Carlos Bathan.
Acosta is a fellow of the East-West Center in Washington DC (EWCW) and an alumnus of the US State Department’s premier professional exchange program International Visitor Leadership Program.
As a Philippine-based journalist, Acosta contributed stories and analyses on domestic and regional issues for renowned international think tanks, such as the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and Oxford Analytica in the United Kingdom.
He had also written and edited stories for the online portal of the US Pacific Command’s Asia Pacific Defense Forum (now Indo-Pacific Forum) and United States Naval Research Institute News.
Penguin Random House has published and launched in Singapore his book, “The War on Terror: How the Philippine Military and the US Broke the Axis of Terror in the Philippines,” and was the “featured author” in 2019 by the Singapore Writers Festival, considered as one of Asia’s premier literary events.
The journalist and book author delivered lectures on the three themes during the 10-day literary feast sponsored by the Singapore Arts Council.
Until his appointment, Acosta was a reporter for BusinessMirror, which he joined in its founding in 2005, and where he had been covering defense and national security issues during the past years.
A former president of the Defense Press Corps of the Philippines, Acosta began his journalism career at the state-owned Philippine News Agency (PNA) in 1989 while still a journalism student. He later rose from the ranks.
In his junior years as a reporter, Acosta wrote and edited stories for wire agencies while based and working for a newspaper in Western Pacific.
Before joining BusinessMirror from the defunct Today newspaper, Acosta briefly worked for the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines as a communication consultant, where he helped work for the removal of the country from the Priority Watch List on piracy by the US Trade Representative’s office.
Through strategies and impactful messages, the feat was accomplished in seven months.
Acosta also founded and edited the defunct Intellectual Property Rights Review (IPR Review), the first newspaper in the world of intellectual property rights that was hailed by worldwide IPR advocates. (PNA)
