Though Baptista initially planned on working as a secretary, her husband, a correspondent for
The Times, "lured her into writing", believing that she would be "even better" as a newspaperwoman than as a secretary. At
The Straits Times, Baptista primarily wrote on fashion, penning features on the "latest" trends and interviewing locals involved with the fashion industry, such as dressmaker J. Roberts and models
Violet Neo and
Kisane Davis. She was given her own column for women, titled
Esme Baptista presents a page of news for women. According to Eldrick Cheong, she often "infused her own take" in her articles, "advising women not to blindly follow them but rather adopt them in accordance with their own physique." Cheong argued that her "responsibility in writing and penning articles could be extended to being information carriers, particularly for women who lacked access to information given their dominant roles as caregivers in the 1950s through the 1970s." In the late 1950s, the
Malay Mail merged with
The Straits Times and became its afternoon sister publication. It was soon decided that the
Malay Mail would run an
advice column called "Dear Ann" and Baptista, who was then the only married woman on the staff, was put in charge of it. By May 1965, she would receive around 50 letters a week, 12 to 14 of which would be answered in the column. In June 1965, Baptista attended the Asian-American Women Journalists' Conference in
Honolulu, which was organised by the United States State Department. She was by then the women's editor of
The Straits Times. Baptista's column in
The Straits Times ended in the 1970s. Cheong wrote that this "possibly meant that the personal voices of reporters like Baptista and
Yong had to be curtailed in order to provide a more homogenous front for newspaper companies." ==Personal life and death==