They got your back

I was in New York City last week as I took ten students on the Newhouse Benchmark trip. We visited CNN, Atlas Media Corp., Guiding Light (the soap opera), NBC, ESPN at Madison Square Garden, CBS Sports and the Late Show with David Letterman. At each stop we were given a tour and with the exception of ESPN, all the people who hosted us were graduates of Syracuse University. A sidebar, there were SU grads on the crew at the ESPN compound; they just weren’t part of the tour.

Enough has been written about this wretched economy but if the participation of our graduates is any indication, Newhouse students will be well taken care of. I was both impressed and gratified at the support, kind words and genuine interest all our tour guides had with our group of ten.

“Let me know what I can do for you.”
“Feel free to email me with questions.”
“Things are tough but I’ll do what I can to help.”

Just a few of the comments I heard.

I was also so proud to see some of our very recent grads doing so well. Liz Morrison as Production Coordinator for Atlas Media Corp and Jay Bungay is an editor for “Guiding Light.” They’ve both been out of school for only two years.

I was also tickled to see my old colleague Bob Matina again. Bob is the studio director for CBS Sports. If you’ve watched the “NCAA Selection Show” or the “NFL Today” you’ve seen Bob’s work. Bob is a ’78 grad and he and I worked together at WCNY-TV in the early 80’s. When I called him to ask if we could visit him he was only too happy to oblige.

Say what you want about the plusses and minuses about Newhouse but one thing you simply can not say is that the people who leave here and go on to work in the business do not care about you. They want to help and are almost always willing to do what they can to pave the way for you.

Things are tough but compassion and support are in big supply out there if you are part of the Orange Nation.

What's in your future?

People aren’t buying cars. They’re not taking big flat-screen TV’s home either. Furniture or appliances? Fuggedaboutit.

So what are we consuming?

Food and entertainment. Attendance at the movies is up. People are also staying home and watching TV. What we do in television is still in demand.

Kind of nice to know.

As we try and navigate our way through these tricky economic waters it’s worth putting these experiences into our memory banks. When things turn around you’ll want to bring them back to remind yourself of what bad times were so you can appreciate the good times. But you’ll also want to make sure you have what I call “split vision.”

Split vision is the act of being focused on two different parts of your professional life. The present and the future. The present is pretty obvious: work hard, be on time, add value to your job and be seen as a valuable contributing member of your organization. Hopefully you are part of the group that’s adding to the bottom line. Literally.

The future part is a little trickier. It requires you to look at where you are, what skills you have, what you like to do and are good at and see what kind of changes you need to make to stay current with your industry. Or, look ahead to see what kind of changes you need to make to head in a completely different direction with your career. You need to do this, the future thing, every day and you need to be prepared to make changes that might be looked at as a sacrifice on your part or the part of your family.

My old boss at a company I worked at used to say something I liked. He said, “The Univisions (the name of our company) road ahead is always under construction.”

So what we do is in demand and the people who can bring a lot to the table in their work places will be better off than those who can’t. Are you a good writer? Can you shoot and edit? Can you light well? How about web skills? Any competence in After Effects, Photoshop or Flash? Do you know how to encode video to the web? Ever done any voice-over or on-camera work?

These days will end and things will turn around. Will you be ready for the next difficult economy?