By Femi Salawu
In the media…you are everybody’s darling if you work with an influential platform. You are a powerful person and everybody wants you in bed (literarily). PR & Advert agencies grovel at thy feet, corporate affairs people court you with everything and industry heavy-weights flirt unashamedly with you. It’s an endless honeymoon that comes with a lot of pecks and privileges like traveling the world.
Some media men have become giddy and very arrogant from the lavish attention that they command. Corporate organizations and personalities tremble at the whiff of your pen. Your phone lines are not like Reuben Abati’s because yours are always ringing.
The flip-side of this romance is dreaded by every journalist. God help you the day you leave or get kicked out of that platform. Reality-check kicks-in slowly as the word makes the rounds. Then you wake up one day and realize your phone batteries is lasting longer than usual out of inactivity.
You are like a beautiful wife whose husband woke up one morning and calls off the marriage. Now, in most cases media people are hardly prepared for life after their influential work. Some of them slip into depression and they lose their mojo while others become emergency anti-media activists or rebels. They blame everybody else for their sudden exit but themselves.
Here is the clincher; you start exiting the media the day your first by-line goes public. If you are like some of us who have passed through this familiar road, you realize late that the media has offered something very powerful; a big platform to build your post-media life. Hello architect, how is the building coming along?
You are like a beautiful wife whose husband woke up one morning and calls off the marriage. Now, in most cases media people are hardly prepared for life after their influential work. Some of them slip into depression and they lose their mojo while others become emergency anti-media activists or rebels. They blame everybody else for their sudden exit but themselves.
Here is the clincher; you start exiting the media the day your first by-line goes public. If you are like some of us who have passed through this familiar road, you realize late that the media has offered something very powerful; a big platform to build your post-media life. Hello architect, how is the building coming along?
