Citytv is cutting shows, production staff and on-air talent including veteran CityNews at Six anchor Anne Mroczkowski.
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Ott wouldn’t comment on other staff cuts but the story on Citytv’s website lists the “remaining on-air staff” and they don’t include: Lara Di Battista, Pam Seatle, Farah Nasser, Jee-Yun Lee, Marianne Dimain, Merella Fernandez, and Michael Serapio.
On Tuesday afternoon, the online biographies for those eight broadcasters were all removed from the website.
Mroczkowski had worked there for 23 years. Di Battista and Seatle are both also veterans.
An unknown number of production staff were also laid off.
...The mood inside the Rogers building was grim, as most employees were fearful for their jobs.
“It’s just awful,” said one employee who was not part of the cuts. “Basically, ever since Ted Rogers died, so did the vision of Citytv as a national network player. Nobody has any vision. The bean counters have taken over and they want to turn us into Omni 3.”
The purchase of Citytv was a signal change for Rogers, which is much better known for providing the cable signal than actually running TV stations. It’s previous experience with broadcasting was with community programming stations, and it’s Omni brand of multicultural stations, which are both much cheaper to run than full fledge TV stations, that buy content from U.S. networks. As well, with only five stations in big cities across Canada, the Citytv brand was much smaller compared to the national coverage of its competitors, CTV and Global.
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