UP College of Mass Communication announces 2023 Glory awardees

Five communicators will be honored with the 2023 Gawad Gloria Feliciano—also known as the Glory Award—after being selected as outstanding alumni of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication (UPCMC).

The 2023 awardees are Atty. Rowena E.V. Daroy-Morales (public service), Lynda Jumilla-Abalos (multi-media journalism), Maria Lourdes B. Cabaero (community journalism), Martika Ramirez Escobar (independent filmmaking),  and Paz Verdades M. Santos (cultural preservation). Like the previous awardees, they will receive sculpted trophies designed by UP professor emeritus Dr. Gigi Javier-Alfonso.

“The five winners emerged from a long list of deserving nominees this year. Seven jurors voted for them based on the excellence and impact of their work in various mass communication and allied fields,” said Malou Choa-Fagar, president of the UPCMC Alumni Association which administers the alumni recognition program.

Now on its seventh year, the annual Glory Awards will be presented during the UPCMC Alumni Homecoming on November 11, 2023 at the UP Film Institute in UP Diliman.

This year’s Glory Awards jury of peers was composed of former UPCMC dean and communication research professor Dr. Elena E. Pernia; 2021 Glory Awardee for Corporate Communication Marlu Balmaceda; OneNews anchor and 2017 Glory Awardee for Journalism Roby Alampay; GMA News Consultant and 2018 Glory Awardee for Broadcast Journalism Grace de la Peña-Reyes; UP Vice President for Public Affairs and former UPCMC dean Dr. Roland Tolentino; UP Broadcast Communication and Media Studies professor Dr. Daphne Tatiana Tolentino-Canlas; and former ABS-CBN and CNN Philippines news director Jing Magsaysay, who represents the family of Dr. Gloria Feliciano, the founding dean from 1965 to 1985 of UP’s mass communication program, in whose name the award was dedicated.

UPCMC alumni homecoming tickets will be available at the venue for P1,000 each to cover the dinner, awards show, raffle participation, and alumni membership fee. Singer-songwriter Jay Durias of South Border Band will be the featured performing artist along with acoustic duo Dindo & Ryan.

The 2023 Winners

Lawyer Rowie Morales has gone back to her mass communication roots in recent years to share her legal expertise and compassion more widely among the marginalized sectors of society. Her return was rewarded with a 2022 Catholic Mass Media Award for Best Public Service Program on Radio for her DZBB/GMA Network program, “SOS: Serbisyo On the Spot,” where she serves as co-host and legal resource. Morales has actually been extending free legal assistance for many years particularly to abused women and children while advocating reforms to improve the Philippine justice system.

In UP where she is a professor emeritus, she headed the College of Law’s Office of Free Legal Aid for two decades and coached UP and Philippine law debating teams that won moot court and debate competitions in Washington D.C., Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur.

Lynda Jumilla-Abalos covered and presented the news for more than three decades—on print for Philippine Star and Philippine Daily Inquirer and on television, radio and digital platforms.

She received the Marshall MacLuhan Fellowship in 2012, the first TV journalist to be awarded since the fellowship was established in 1997 by the Embassy of Canada in the Philippines. She became executive editor of ABS-CBN News Digital in 2019 with responsibility for the editorial content and strategic direction of its news website, social media accounts, video channels and other digital properties before her retirement in 2023.

Nini Cabaero is a pioneer and advocate of digital transformation initiatives in Philippine community journalism. She was director of content for the integrated digital newsroom of SunStar, the only network of community newspapers in the Philippines, and was editor-in-chief of the media group’s flagship newspaper, SunStar Cebu.

Nini was a Sandra Burton–Nieman Fellow from 2013 to 2014 during which she spent an academic year at Harvard University and took courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In retirement from full-time work, she still pursues journalism but in a different capacity as a consultant-resource speaker on the integration of print and website newsrooms, online audience measurement, and strategies for managing a digital transition.

Filmmaker-cinematographer Marty Escobar has impressed juries worldwide with her well-thought-out narratives and sharp eye for detail. In 2022, she became the first Philippine director to win at the Sundance Film Festival—the largest independent film festival in the United States—where her first feature film “Leonor Will Never Die” was the first Filipino film to compete since “Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros” in 2006. Sundance jurors gave her the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Innovative Spirit for her 99-minute homage to vintage Filipino action movies. The film has garnered eight other international recognitions and was distributed in theaters in the US, UK, Japan, Middle East, and Thailand. Escobar’s previous short films “Pusong Bato” (2014), “Dindo” (2014), “Quadrilaterals” (2017), and “Limang Taon Ni Lola” (2013) were also well-received in local and international festivals.

Doods Santos is one of the country’s foremost multi-lingual literary writers. She received the National Book Award for Bikol Fiction for “Hagong: Mga Osipon” (2014), the 2011 Gawad Francisco Balagtas from the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino for significant contribution to the blossoming of Philippine and Bikol language and literature, and the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL) 2011 Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez for outstanding achievement as literature and communication teacher.

She was a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in New York in 1991. The retired professor now heads a volunteer environmental organization, Sumaro sa Salog (Unite for the River) in Camarines Sur. She taught for more than four decades at the Colegio de Sta. Isabel, University of Nueva Caceres, Ateneo de Naga University, Miriam College, UP Clark, UP Diliman, and De la Salle University in Manila.