Maria Ressa

Maria A. Ressa is the CEO and Executive Editor of Rappler, a social news network which uses a hearts and minds approach to news through a unique mood navigator. Rappler combines the best of professional journalism with citizen journalism and crowdsourcing.

Maria worked as a journalist in Asia for more than 25 years, most of them as CNN’s bureau chief in Manila then Jakarta. She became CNN’s lead investigative reporter focusing on terrorism networks and wrote Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia in 2003. The book was the first from the region documenting the growth of Jemaah Islamiyah and its links to al-Qaeda.

Maria worked for every major television network in the Philippines and was one of the founders of independent production company, Probe. In 2005, she became the senior vice-president of ABS-CBN’s news group, heading the largest multi-platform news operation in the Philippines. For 6 years, she set strategic direction, ran training programs for more than 1,000 journalists and helped put together a comprehensive standards & ethics manual. She streamlined workflows and helped increase the group’s gross profit rate from 54% to 70%.

Maria taught courses in politics and media for her alma mater, Princeton University, and in broadcast principles at the University of the Philippines. Her book, From Bin Laden to Facebook, is part of her work as author-in-residence and senior fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence & Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Maria Ressa was a speaker and panelist during Norwegian Risk Forum 2014, which examined Risks and Rewards for Foreign Investors in Southeast Asia.

In 2018, Time Magazine nominated Maria Ressa to Person Of The Year. In 2021, Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize.