When the Philippine Entertainment Portal held its press conference on March 31, 2009, at the 8 Spices restaurant on Tomas Morato, Quezon City, it made two announcements.

One, PEP explained its "Letter from the Editor" apologizing to Richard Gutierrez, Michael Flores, Epy Quizon, and PEP readers, which had been posted on the site the night before.

Two, PEP announced it would release the results of its investigation into the March 29 Incident once completed. The March 29 Incident, for newcomers to the site, is the stuff of the article "Richard Gutierrez reportedly involved in a heated squabble with Michael Flores," uploaded in PEP last March 29.

It is an article that only a very few got to read.

And it's only right. The article was one I had deactivated right away upon discovering that, due to a break in editorial procedure, it had prematurely and inadvertently been uploaded. Its research was still in its inception stage; it still did not have the side of the stars named in the article; and it still had to reconcile various facts and details to tell the story well.

It was not, in short, the kind of article that PEP would have uploaded at any time, except through a mishap in normal operations—which is what happened exactly.

March 29 was a Sunday. The time of the upload was roughly 4:15 in the afternoon; the time of the deactivation, roughly 7:20 in the evening. In essence, the pullout came just three hours and five minutes after its uploading and within seconds of my finding out that the article was active on the site.

NOISE AND HYPE. At the time of the article's deactivation, it had been up on cyberspace no more than 185 minutes. In other words, a very brief period. The article had not yet made noise. It was the events that followed that made it noisy.

Annabelle Rama, mother and manager to Richard Gutierrez, wanted an apology posted in PEP. (In good faith, we put out one inside 23 hours of the article's pullout.) Next, she wanted the reporter who wrote the story paraded before television to apologize to her son. (In good faith, but without subjecting our reporter to that level of scrutiny, I offered to do the apology myself, which she agreed to.) Then, it became bigger. She wanted PEP to call a proper press conference within two days of the pullout. (Again in good faith, we did—inviting television, radio, print, and the web.)

Ruffa Gutierrez, sister to Richard and vice president of the family's Royal Era Entertainment & Artist Management, appeared on her morning show, Ruffa & Ai, on March 30, or just one full day after the party of Mark Reyes, and broadcast the issue on nationwide television. By evening of the same day, she appeared on SNN (Showbiz News Ngayon), again to broadcast the issue.

The matriarch of the family and managing director of Royal Era, Annabelle Rama, called for her own press conference just two days later, on April 1. The next day, Richard Gutierrez granted interviews with showbiz television talk shows also on the subject. And Jun Lalin, the Gutierrezes' publicist, had put the story out days earlier in Abante Tonite.

It had become noisy.

REPRINTING AN APOLOGY. For a better understanding of the PEP apology on the site, we reprint it, thus:

Letter from the Editor

This is a statement of clarification, correction, and apology.

Yesterday, March 29, at a little past 4:15 p.m., the Philippine Entertainment Portal (PEP) uploaded a story on Richard Gutierrez and Michael Flores alleging that the two actors had a confrontation on March 28 at director Mark Reyes's birthday celebration. The four-paragraph story ended by saying the PEP "at press time is still investigating the incident."

The fact is that a report did reach PEP about an incident that reportedly occurred at around 1 a.m. of March 29, allegedly involving Richard Gutierrez and Michael Flores. When I was told about this incident, I recognized that it was of interest to the public, and gave instructions to the staff to investigate further.