Wires and Lights

It’s the first of January, and frankly, U2 was right: Nothing changes on New Year’s Day. Unless you change it, that is. It’s really what you do the rest of the year that counts, don’t you think?

You can make all the resolutions you want on the first day of the year, but it’s the follow-through that determines whether your life improves or not. If you need to make a change today, you’ll still be needing to make a change tomorrow, unless you get to work and do something about it now.

I’m a big believer in -- and I know it’s an old cliché – making hay while the sun shines. You got something to do? Get it done. Need something to do? Find something to do. It seems simplistic, but ask yourself: Have you or anyone you know ever talked a lot about taking some important next step, only to find one excuse after another to keep from doing it – whatever it was?

I’m happy to say that many of the folks I know in the media business are not letting the grass grow under their feet. In a year that Media of Birmingham blogger Wade Kwon called “brutal” for the local media business, many professionals lost their jobs. But many wasted no time getting back to work. Maybe they were driven by fear, or the need for validation and reassurance, or an income – or all of those things. Whatever the motivation, some folks have been quick to demonstrate that there is life after whatever they were doing before.

I hope to have interviews with more of these enterprising professionals in the weeks to come, on new episodes of my podcast, Media Talking Media. If you’d like to tell me and MTM’s growing audience about your life in the media, drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, I’d like to leave you with something said by the great journalist Edward R. Murrow, recently portrayed in the 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck. At the end of the film, Murrow, one of the giants of CBS broadcast history, was talking about why the news matters on television. But his words, spoken by the actor David Strathairn, may have resonance for whatever you bring to the media and in whichever branch you work:

“I begin by saying that history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us,” he said. “Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information… To those who say the people wouldn’t look, they’re too complacent, indifferent, and they’re insulated, I can only reply, there is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention…

“This instrument can teach. It can illuminate, and yes it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

Murrow was quite a guy. And he makes quite a point.