New Year's Wish List

This is the time of year when bloggers and pundits and "experts" or all sorts make predictions for the new year.  I am not smart enough (nor arrogant enough) to come up with predictions.  Rather, I will present, for your enjoyment, my wish list for the new year.  None of these wishes have any specific relation to what I think is likely to happen.  It has no basis in reality.  It's just a silly little New Year's gift for you!

• I wish someone would figure out how to do a 24-hour news channel that actually provided 24 hours of news.  Just news.  For 24 hours.
• I used to have a watch that was self-winding.  It never needed a battery and always ran.  Why can't my cellphone work like that?
• Will 2013 be the year that it stops being called "new" media?
• I wish that marketers of poor products or weak messages would stop trying to compensate for both by being louder than anyone else.
• I hope, unrealistically, that the 2016 Presidential Race will take at least a year off before we start getting barraged with predictions, ads and news stories. 
• I hope that someone finds several unaired seasons of The West Wing, MASH, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers and Saturday Night Live with the original cast.  And they are available for free.  Sorry Netflix.
• I hope that social media stops being the strategy and starts being a means to accomplish a strategy.
• I wish that someone would successfully clone Walter Cronkite and have him re-teach newscasters how to deliver the news.
• Since cloning is now available, I also hope someone clones Buddy Holly, Walter Payton, Abraham Lincoln (assuming that Daniel Day-Lewis is busy), Frank Capra, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mark Twain and Billie Holiday. 
• I hope that marketers will learn to embrace two-way communications and learn to seek out and embrace feedback from customers and non-customers, even negative feedback.
• I hope that Cubs fans no longer have to "wait until next year."  And I don't mean because the team goes out of business.
• I hope that we can go for a year without a prediction of the end of the world.  If there is such a prediction, I hope that the media is mature enough not to give it any attention.
• I hope 2013 brings more smiles and fewer tears.  More joy and less sorrow.  More life and less death.  More patience and less intolerance.  More growth and less destruction.
• I wish that you have a wonderful new year.  As my Dad always says during toasts, I wish you Peace, Prosperity, Happiness and Health! 

Have a Happy 2013!