President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has appointed veteran journalist and book author Renato “Rene” Acosta as the new head of the National Printing Office, an attached agency of the Presidential Communications Office, Malacañang announced Saturday.
Press Secretary Cheloy Velicaria-Garafil said that Acosta will replace Carlos Bathan as the director of the government’s official printing arm.
Acosta was a fellow of the East-West Center in Washington DC and an alumnus of the US State Department’s premier professional exchange program International Visitor Leadership Program.
The Philippine-based journalist has 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.
Acosta had also written and edited stories for the online portal of the US Pacific Command’s Asia Pacific Defense Forum, now known as Indo-Pacific Forum. He also worked for the United States Naval Research Institute News.
His book, titled “The War on Terror: How the Philippine Military and the US Broke the Axis of Terror in the Philippines,” was published and launched in Singapore by Penguin Random House.
Acosta was also the “featured author” in 2019 by the Singapore Writers Festival—considered 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.
Acosta was a former president of the Defense Press Corps of the Philippines.
He began his journalism career at the state-owned Philippine News Agency in 1989 while still a journalism student and later rose from the ranks.
Acosta wrote and edited stories for wire agencies during his junior years as a reporter. He was also based and worked 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.
Acosta also founded and edited the defunct Intellectual Property Rights Review—the first newspaper in the world of intellectual property rights that was hailed by worldwide IPR advocates.
The NPO, the agency that Acosta now headed, is tasked to continue to provide printing services to government agencies and instrumentalities as mandated by law.
It also provides printing of official ballots and election paraphernalia which could be shared with Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas, upon the discretion of the Commission on Election consistent with the provision of the Election Code of 1987.