Horacio “Howie” Severino has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, and has produced over 200 TV documentaries, at least a dozen of which have won domestic and international awards. He is in his 23rd year as a TV documentarist for I-Witness, one of the longest-running television shows in the Philippines. He is also a pioneering podcast host for GMA Integrated News. He anchored the morning news at GMA News TV for eight years. From 2009 to 2014, he was editor-in-chief of GMA News Online. In other stages of his career, he was a newspaper reporter and magazine editor. He is a co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. He retired in 2021 as a Vice President of GMA Network, responsible for the training of its journalists. His documentaries have covered many heritage-related themes, which has led him to become an advocate and teacher of Baybayin, the ancient Filipino script. He has produced five documentaries on Jose Rizal, which have been used widely in classrooms across the Philippines. Howie was born in Manila but spent a large part of his youth in the United States as a diplomat’s son, and graduated from Tufts University in the US with a degree in History, magna cum laude. He received his MA degree in Environmental Policy from Sussex University in the UK. His documentary on being an early Covid survivor, “Ako si Patient 2828,” won Best Documentary in the Philippines’ Gawad Tanglaw awards and became one of the most watched Philippine documentaries of all time. In 2023, he was given the prestigious Balagtas literary award for his writings by the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas (UMPIL).
