kuwentuhan lang.

It was January 16, 2008 when most of my friends-cum-former mentors at the old WLS-FM back home in Manila, by then already reformatted into a “masa” station, were given the boot without even having a chance to say a formal “goodbye”. In April that same year (to be exact, on Easter Sunday), some of these ousted DJs resurfaced at a reformatted DWRT-FM (which became “99.5 Campus FM”, then “Campus 99.5”), only to be given the boot again four months later as that station reverted to their former, more recognizable “99.5RT” branding.

Fast forward to January 19, 2010. First thing when I got up, I, along with many other people here in the Great White North, found out that something similar happened to what was already my favorite local television station in this city, Citytv. Last Monday, a massive layoff was under way over at that station, as well as its four sister stations in the other Canadian provinces, involving both on-camera and off-camera personnel. One of them was 6:00pm weeknight anchor/reporter Anne Mroczkowski, who was with the station for more than 30 years. I once talked about her briefly here. What made it even sadder was, the previous night, she anchored the supper-hour newscast solo (minus longtime co-anchor Gord Martineau who was off that night), and ended it the way she had always done for the last handful of months: signing off with the words, “We’ll see you back here tomorrow. Good night!” Who would’ve thought that she wasn’t going to be back the next evening?

I never really knew these people the same way I knew the guys at LS. But one thing I’ve realized from my almost three years in this country is that local television personalities that you watch everyday become like friends or a part of the family. And with Anne and several other fellow reporters gone, it was just like losing friends or family. That’s when I thought of the sort-of “deja vu”—and incidentally, just like at LS, it had to happen on a January.

And then, another realization: perhaps, no one is really that indispensable in the broadcast industry—an industry that could either thrive or wilt amid changing viewer preferences and audience types. And this same industry, like any other business, is not totally immune to the effects of these economic times. It’s a bitter pill anyone, perhaps, has to swallow. And for both viewers and broadcast workers alike, it’s a fact that we should accept, even if it means breaking habits or breaking relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, though. It will be hard to get used to the after-effects of an event like this. But…gano’n talaga, eh.