Maxxy Santiago: Holding Journalism to Depth

Words by Mye Mulingtapang

Maxxy Santiago has spent more than two decades reporting on the lives of overseas Filipinos, bringing depth, accuracy, and compassion to stories that matter. As an ABS-CBN Senior Correspondent, Global Head of The Filipino Correspondent Network, and host of Pinoy Arabia ME, she continues to amplify the voices of Filipino communities across Kuwait and the Middle East through journalism rooted in service and trust.

Maxxy Santiago reports from landscapes where stories are rarely neat and never predictable.

For more than two decades, she has worked in spaces where journalism and community intersect—not as parallel lines, but as overlapping terrain. Based in the Gulf for much of her career, she has chronicled what happens when lives stretch far from home, when labor and livelihood become entangled with law, displacement, and isolation. Her work began in environments that resist simplification: migrant worker hubs, contested labor markets, and diasporic communities carrying both memory and urgency.

Santiago’s reporting does not arrive as spectacle. It arrives anchored in listening—listening to voices rarely amplified, to patterns not easily visible, to the slow rhythms of life that outlast a news cycle. Her journalistic instinct has always leaned toward continuity: tracking issues over years, not just days; staying with subjects until the distance between fact and consequence disappears.

It was in these intersections that she extended her role beyond headlines. What began as coverage evolved into platforms that connected communities to information—and to one another. Radio segments became lifelines. Broadcasts did more than inform; they became spaces where truth was spoken plainly, in language that mattered to daily life.

Through her roles as ABS-CBN Senior Correspondent, The Filipino Correspondent Network Global Head, and Pinoy Arabia ME host, Santiago has shaped how Filipino audiences in the Middle East see themselves—not as margins waiting for notice, but as communities whose experiences deserve clarity, depth, and sustained attention. She has reported on labor conditions, cultural shifts, policy impacts, and human struggle with the same commitment—refusing easy narratives, refusing distance.

Her years in journalism have reinforced a simple principle: what matters most is not how loudly a story is told, but how enduringly it resonates with the people living it, day after day.