Why Saksi succeeds

It pays to be different, even if it means staking your neck on the chopping board. This, the people behind GMA-7’s early evening newscast Saksi (Monday to Friday, 6 p.m.), found out when it added another feather to its cap: being adjudged Best News program in the Asian TV Awards 2000, besting such formidable newscasts as Star News Asia of Star TV and TV Patrol.

Saksi Executive Producer Gin de Mesa knew she was taking a big risk by making her newscasts as informal as possible. Instead of stiff, non-moving newscasters standing in the studio, Mike Enriquez and Vicky Morales dug their shoes in the Payatas garbage heap (the program’s award-winning entry to the Asian TV Awards), got soaked in the mud created by the latest tropical storm, exposed themselves to the elements.

For running to where the action is, Mike and Vicky gave Saksi that air of immediacy and urgency so vital in a newscast.

It isn’t easy, braving the elements and being on call, even on weekends. It’s a wonder how Vicky Morales finds time to be with her boyfriend, a lawyer who follows the impeachment trial with great interest.

But being a portable newscast has its generous share of ups. For one, it gives you a crash course on social consciousness. It makes you meet the highest officers of the land to the lowest, like victims of the Cherry Hills landslide. You see human drama unfold right before your eyes – from missing relatives aboard a sunken ship, to OFWs pleading for justice.

Enriquez calls it a "perpetual state of alert." You can’t even take a vacation on weekends, he adds, albeit in a noncomplaining tone.

Gin looks at it as being flexible.

Whatever it is, it is certainly no piece of cake. For one, lugging tons of expensive camera equipment sensitive to the elements is no joke. Getting there – especially when terrain is rugged and the weather harsh, is an ordeal.

But since Enriquez and Morales are working journalists, not the armchair kind, they and the 30-strong Saksi staff rush to where the action is.

Unlike print and radio journalists however, the hosts have lost a large measure of their privacy. Enriquez gets requests for picture-taking sessions and help in finding missing relatives or solving other problems.

"I refer them to the proper agencies if I can," says Enriquez.

Morales has had a deluge of love letters from admirers impressed by her poise, even in the most sordid face of poverty, Payatas-style.

But to Morales, her crowning glory lies not in her poise, but in her recently-found skill in speaking Tagalog, thanks to the daily program.

Saksi’s conversational style has made her more at home with the native tongue, a skill indispensable when dealing with the common tao, whom she brushes elbows with on the job.

Morales also takes pride in giving people in the news a more human face in her Profiles segment. Thus, people got to see the softer side of say, the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan, which is usually hidden from public eyes.

It’s a charmed life, but it’s certainly not a cinch, with generous helpings of hard, unglamorous work. The best part is, Enriquez, Morales and their young executive producer Gin de Mesa would not have it any other way.