Maria Lourdes (Nini) Cabaero is a pioneer of new media in Philippine community journalism. She was director for content for the integrated newsroom and editor-in-chief of SunStar Cebu, flagship newspaper of the Cebu-based SunStar Publishing Inc. She retired on March 1, 2021. She continues with SunStar as columnist and consultant on digital. SunStar in the only network of community newspapers in the Philippines.

Cabaero holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and a master’s degree in journalism from the Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University. She currently teaches at the Ateneo master’s program for journalism. Cabaero was a Sandra Burton–Nieman Fellow where she spent an academic year at Harvard University from 2013 to 2014. She took courses at the Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She won as “Newsmaker of the Year” in November 2020 in the Globe Media Excellence Awards of Globe Telecom for her “impactful body of work” that year and her role in the digital transformation of the community press in the Philippines.