She graduated from the College of the Holy Spirit Manila and the University of the Philippines with a degree in political science.
After the People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos, she worked as a political reporter for The Manila Times and The Manila Chronicle, and in 1989, became the first executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, one of the earliest nonprofit investigative centers to be formed globally.
Her recent work is on the populist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and police abuses in the war on drugs.
In a 2019 article for The Atlantic, she and two Stabile Center fellows estimated that the casualties in Duterte's drug war were three times more than what the police claimed.
[7] As part of a series on populist autocrats published by Foreign Affairs, she traced Duterte's rise from the gun-toting mayor of Davao City to president.
[9] In early 1999, Coronel received the McLuhan Prize from the Canadian Embassy in Manila for her work as an investigative journalist.