SOME PRINT journalists have probably been cursing themselves for not going into broadcast media instead, especially television, which in the Philippines seems to have borne minimum impact from the prolonged recession. Between print and broadcast, advertisers on average pour more money into the latter. Pangilinan, who is also general manager of the ad agency Campaigns and Grey, says that of the total P27 billion spent by ad agency clients in 2001, 66 percent went to television, 18 percent went to radio, and 16 percent to print.

Still, he says that when advertising budgets shrink, as they had the past year, "there is a flight to quality," or a tendency to go where the advertising money will yield optimum results. This means it is the smaller ones that hurt because the ad money goes to the bigger networks with the wider reach.

Pangilinan estimates that practically half of the advertising budget for television last year went to industry leader ABS-CBN, which enjoys a lion's share of 40 percent of the audience in a field of six television networks. Ironically, though, it is ABS-CBN that has had the most displacements so far as a result, it says, of the economic crisis.

Last December, ABS-CBN sought the Department of Labor and Employment's (DOLE) approval for its redundancy program, which was part of a cost-reduction campaign. Some 150 employees in ABS-CBN and its subsidiaries ABS-CBN News Channel, Star Cinema, and ABS-CBN Interactive were to be initially covered by the redundancy plan, while another 100 would follow.

ABS-CBN can claim to be in the same boat as the country's other beleaguered media companies, but only to a certain extent. A publicly listed company, it has profit levels to surpass, and not just maintain. ABS-CBN earned P1.3 billion in the first nine months of 2001. Industry reports say this was four times what GMA Channel 7, its closest competitor, earned for the same period. But the figure was almost 20 percent less than what ABS-CBN made during the comparative period in 2000—causing much alarm within the company.

Pangilinan also reveals that things were bad for ABS-CBN in 2001 because it faced a very serious challenge from GMA 7, whose audience share rose dramatically following an aggressive reprogramming. Last year also saw both networks confronted by IBC Channel 13 blocktimer Viva Television, which put out the high-rating game shows that were later copied by almost all the other networks.

To top it all off, it was ABS-CBN that had to bail out sister companies Bayantel and Maynilad Water Services Inc., the two utilities firms in the Lopez empire that have suffered heavy losses in the last few years. Earlier last year, ABS-CBN made cash advances to prop up the two ailing companies. The perception in the advertising and broadcast industries is that ABS-CBN simply didn't know how to manage its profits, and its business in general.

But ABS-CBN isn't the only big broadcast network with such a problem. Publicly-listed Manila Broadcasting Company (MBC), which owns radio station DZRH, laid off scores of its employees in at least two rounds of retrenchments over the past year. In March 2001, 179 DZRH employees were given their walking papers, ostensibly because the station was losing money. Employees questioned this, since DZRH had then just purchased four outside-broadcast (OB) vans. Their grumblings were ignored, however, and this January, another 40 or so employees, some of them senior broadcast journalists, were laid off in yet another cost-reducing scheme.

More are to lose their jobs at DZRH if a stock-sharing scheme proposed by MBC chair Fred Elizalde will push through. Under the arrangement, Elizalde, whose family is the majority stockholder of MBC, keeps anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of gross profits. The employees get whatever remains, with which all operating expenses, including salaries, would be paid. DZRH employees, fearing the scheme would burden them with running the radio stations while leaving Elizalde sitting pretty, have raised questions over the plan's propriety and feasibility.

This year, advertising revenues are expected to stay at 2001 levels. That's bad news for the broadcast industry. But there are still optimists who say an economic rebound is a possibility that could have the ad industry, and the media, back on a steady financial course again.

In the meantime, most of those displaced by the upheavals in media are still out on job hunts. Bert Tan for one had a brief stint with a monthly magazine in Singapore before moving to Bangkok where he was slated to replace a journalist on the way out of a leading Thai broadsheet. But hard times forced the journalist to stay put, and Tan found himself in between jobs again.

He is now home, where he has resorted to freelancing, writing lifestyle articles and movie or book reviews for a leading local broadsheet. But freelance journalism in the Philippines doesn't pay that much. For every article he contributes to the broadsheet, Tan gets only P1,500, and his expenses doing the story are his own to bear.

For now, his separation package from Project Eyeball keeps him alive. He has also taken up a new hobby: keeping tabs on other publications with familiar end-of-the-road experiences now lying in the media industry's morgue.

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