“Lots of conversations going on behind the scenes but I fully expect you will see the whole team next year.”

American Idol host Ryan Seacrest on his Twitter page today, amidst reports that he sealed a deal with CKX (CKXE), the parent company of Idol producer 19 Entertainment, worth $45 million over three years. No salary caps in this biz. The deal reportedly triples Seacrest’s annual pay for hosting the top-rated show on TV.

“I don’t think you’re going to have those anymore. Bigness isn’t that great an asset anymore.”

– Tom Freston, former Viacom (VIAB) CEO, in a Reuters story about the waning influence of media moguls. These titans are being upstaged by the darlings of digital, like Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Old and new media alike are gathered this week at the Allen & Co. media summit in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Freston’s opinion comes from experience. After being fired in 2006 by one major media tycoon — Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone — he has gone on to help Oprah build her OWN cable network (which is likely to have a strong digital play) and to join U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS. Read more about Freston in Pattie’s profile of “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” –Jessica Shambora

“If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change.”

– Michael Jackson’s lyrics from “The Man in the Mirror.” The song rang out as the King of Pop’s casket was carried out of the Staples Center in Los Angeles Tuesday. The 20,000 seat arena was filled to capacity as fans witnessed tributes from Smokey Robinson, Brooke Shields, Al Sharpton and others during the two-and-a-half hour ceremony. –Jessica Shambora

Greetings from France. I’m at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, where the skies are sunny and the industry outlook is dark. This morning, Marcel Fenez, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global entertainment and media practice, laid out the dismal details. He called the current recession in ad spending “not cyclical but structural.”

Which means that the advertising business has permanently changed. And it’s going to be rough sailing for a long while. Global ad spending will decline 12.1% this year, Fenez estimated. Next year will be another bad year — down 2.7% — before an upturn begins in 2011.

That’s the worldwide view, and the U.S. picture looks even worse. Fernez forecast a 14.8% drop in spending this year and 3.3% next year.  Hardest hit: TV, newspapers and consumer magazines. (That’s us at Fortune!)  Stealing share as the total pie shrinks: Video-game companies and the Internet. (That’s us at CNNMoney.com!)

“The upturn will be all about structural change,” says Fenez. So what’s a big fat media company to do? In lieu of getting more ad revenues, media outfits will try to get consumers to pay for content, particularly digital as the world goes in that direction. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2009 survey of consumers across the globe indicate that they’re game to pay for quality and premium content. So, says Fenez, we’ll see lots of experimenting with micropayments, stored-value cards, and “all you can eat” subscriptions. But it won’t be easy getting people to pay for what they’ve gotten used to getting for free.

To take a deeper dive into the global outlook and the challenges, you can go to pwc.com/outlook and see the full report, executive summary and video….Now heading to the Cannes Lions Tweet-up with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Hill & Knowlton. More later! — Pattie Sellers

The sun’s coming out in New York City after a week of seemingly endless rain. This was also a whirlwind week of interesting encounters.

On Tuesday, I had lunch, unexpectedly, with Walt Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger. We were both at the New York Stock Exchange for Jeff Sonnenfeld’s Yale CEO Summit, and Iger was getting the “Legend in Leadership Award.” The Summit was off the record (as was the lunch), but I can tell you that Iger talked about the commonly held notion that the world is flattening out culturally. It’s a misconception, he contends. He noted a rise in local pride and said that Disney, in response, is turning distribution centers into creative centers and producing more local TV shows. My Fortune colleague Richard Siklos wrote about this and more in “Bob Iger Rocks Disney” earlier this year.

On Wednesday, I led a Q&A with Condoleezza Rice. This was for a small group of execs, private and pro bono. (We at Fortune can’t take money; I do these gigs occasionally for exposure and connections.) It was off-the-record, but I can tell you that Rice, now at Stanford University, is optimistic about the Middle East. She’s planning to teach in the fall. For now, she’s busy writing two books: one on foreign policy and the other about her parents. Ever a model of discipline, she gets up at 5:15 a.m. to work out — better than a 4:30 a.m., which was her wake-up time in Washington. This is her routine six days a week — after working out, she writes for three or four hours. (And yes, she’s writing the books herself.)

Yesterday, my Postcards partner Jessica Shambora and I shared and learned wisdom about careers on NBC Universal’s Mentors Walk. Check out our Thursday’s Postcard. By the way, Jess and I saw The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 last night. If you’re up for intensity, see it. Travolta is tremendous.

P.S. David Kirkpatrick, Fortune’s star tech editor and writer who’s been on book leave since last August, just swung by and gave me a big, big hug. He’s working tirelessly on The Facebook Effect, due next spring. You can follow the book’s progress and become a fan at www.facebook.com/thefacebookeffect.

Seventy of New York’s top women in media joined 160 aspiring young women for a “Mentors Walk” in Central Park this morning. It was drizzly and great. NBC Universal (GE) and Step Up Women’s Network, a non-profit group all about advancing women and girls, hosted. The Mentor Walk’s creator, former Oxygen Media CEO Gerry Laybourne, was there along with J. Crew (JCG) President Tracy Gardner, Bank of America (BAC) Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, Real Housewives of New York star Bethenny Frankel….an eclectic mix!

Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBCU’s Women & Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, was mentor-in-chief. She, along with the rest of us mentors, accompanied the young women on a “walk & talk” through Central Park, followed by breakfast at Tavern on the Green. I walked with a young woman named Maria Jordan, a young finance manager who spent four years at IBM (IBM) before moving to General Electric’s (GE) NBCU. Jessica Shambora, my Postcards colleague, walked with Zalaznick, who is something of a media-industry phenom, having built Bravo into a highly profitable cable brand. Jessica and I both learned a lot and thought we’d share with you by letting you in on our post-Mentors Walk email chat:

Jessica: What did you talk about with your mentees?

Pattie: My favorite advice that I give to young people, women and men alike: Focus on the job at hand. Don’t plan your career. And think of your career as a jungle gym, not a ladder. Who can know, especially in today’s unpredictable world, what the next big thing will be? You need to have peripheral vision and swing to opportunities as they come along. Agree?

Jessica: I do. I think Lauren Z. would too. She told her mentees, “In your career, you can have high expectations for good experience, but it’s hard to have expectations for an exact path.” From her perspective, today was about helping the mentees understand the things they need to be thinking about to get to the next level in their career, as opposed to thinking your mentor or anyone else is going to just give you a job. Although we both know that can happen at these events!

Pattie: Indeed! So I gotta share our story. I did my first Mentors Walk in 2006. I was assigned to a mentee named Selena Soo, this charismatic young woman who got a velvet grip on me and never let me go. Since then, I’ve spoken and moderated panels at events that she’s organized. One event was 15 months ago at NYU: a career panel with Citigroup (C) CMO Lisa Caputo and a few other rising-star women. Before the panel began, you walked up to me and said, “My name is Jessica Shambora. I’ve read your stuff for years and I’ve seen you on panels. I even blogged about you.” I loved your manner and your confidence.

Jessica: Yeah, I just thought it would be cool to get to know you. I felt a strong connection to the “Most Powerful Women” idea—the stuff that you talked and wrote about often. I never imagined what would happen next. I was just pursuing my passions and interests, and it led to one of those “right place, right time” situations…

Pattie: That’s a lesson. You never know what will come out of a chance encounter. As a Fortune Editor at Large who started here 25 years ago as a reporter (like you are now!), I’ve been struck so often that just getting out there brings opportunity. First, you have to be curious. Curiosity is an undervalued trait. Second, you need to think broadly. Back to that peripheral vision that I mentioned. It’s so easy to bury yourself in your work—there’s so much to do!—but if you’re young and really smart, you think broadly: How can I contribute beyond my assignment? You look for ideas outside your four walls. That is, if you have four walls!

Jessica: Yes, and these are all things you can do no matter what state the economy is in. In fact, you should do them even more during tough times. We’ve heard this from a few different business leaders that we’ve written about on Postcards: Don’t hunker and hide. Get out there, be curious, look around. Think big.

One of the last things Lauren said this morning was about strking the right balance between celebrating and questioning success. When times are tough, she said, make sure to celebrate successes. In good times, deconstruct your successes so your business will have discipline and rigor to survive tough times. It’s a bit counterintuitive. But it’s good advice so you don’t get complacent or take any success for granted.

Pattie: I would never!

Here’s the third and final segment of Tom Freston’s 2007 commencement speech at Emerson College. In earlier posts, Viacom’s (VIAB) former CEO shared career lessons and detailed the first two “things you’re going to want to be able to say you’ve done if ever you are called upon to impart wisdom upon the young.” Here are Nos. 3 and 4 on that list, along with Freston’s warning about what could happen if grads don’t follow his advice.

No. 3: You’re going to want to say that your passport is well worn and filled-to-the-brim with stamps and visas. Because all those exotic stamps from far away places are the kind of tattoos that you won’t regret when you’re older. Travel is the best and probably cheapest graduate school you can buy.

I learned way more from my travels than I ever did in business school. My experiences overseas gave me the self-confidence and international perspective to build MTV and Nickelodeon into global brands early on. We were the first to do that.

A good adventure can change your life – and why would you put that off? It’s too late for you people to drop out of college now, but there are still plenty of things you can drop out of: Just get on a plane and go. Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

We, as Americans, have so much to learn here. We have a shockingly low level of global awareness and familiarity and little idea of how the world sees us. And those disturbing facts keep getting us into a lot of trouble.

The flatter the world, the more you need to be globally attuned and conversant. And you will find that the diversity of friends, interests, and thinking that this will bring you will broaden your scope and enrich your life here at home.

Fourth and last: Forty-years from now, you DO NOT want to say you are still only listening to The Shins and Arcade Fire, or LCD. To do that, you must very consciously maintain your curiosity, broaden your interests and continue to follow the cultural flow wherever it goes. Refuse to get too comfortable with what you already know. People’s tastes and attitudes tend to freeze up in their late ‘20’s. There are plenty of people my age whose cultural preferences were cryogenically sealed in 1974. It’s amazing and it’s not pretty. Many guys my age are still exclusively rocking out to Foghat.

What I have seen over my many years in the media and entertainment business, where I know a lot of you are headed, is that the most successful people – writers, executives, whatever – have many interests, an encyclopedic knowledge about them, and an undying curiosity about social trends and the endless parade of “next new things.”

They are always growing.

So my advice to you: Stave off obsolescence and prolong adolescence. Stay a young thinker. Read, listen to and watch everything you can. Explore the corners of popular culture and the arts. And, of course, these days you have to stay maniacally plugged in to the cutting edge of whatever technology is taking your profession into the future – otherwise you’re toast.

I know you just got done cramming for finals. But most of what you have to learn in life is yet to come. At Emerson you have been immersed to your eyeballs in the mix of today’s culture, and you have all thrived. But it will become increasingly hard to maintain that edge as you get older. Your responsibilities pile up. But learning is never the wrong choice…those who stop learning are the only people who really ever grow old.

Now, I don’t want to scare you but these guidelines I offer are to be ignored at your own peril. If you don’t show maniacal passion for something, if you don’t immerse yourself fully in the world by traveling or living abroad, if you don’t stay curious, if you never change your mind or develop a healthy sense of self-awareness, there is a real danger that you might end up as the President of the United States. [Bush was President when Freston delivered this speech.]

But if you take this very basic advice to heart – to follow your heart and never settle for less, to reincarnate when necessary, to live on our whole planet and revel in all of it and to keep learning always – maybe you will have the kind of career and life that no guidance counselor could have predicted for you.

And maybe, 40 years from now, you will find yourself at a commencement podium passing along the wisdom you acquired. And, if you are especially blessed, you will look out into that sea of graduates and see your own son or daughter in cap and gown.

So, Class of 2007, congratulations on all your hard work. You should feel very proud. Enjoy your accomplishments today and prepare for the great ride that starts tomorrow. Relax – you’re gonna be OK. The fun is just beginning. Best to you always and Godspeed!

For more on Freston, read Pattie’s exclusive profile in the February 16 issue of Fortune, “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” Freston built MTV and rose to be CEO of Viacom, only to be dumped by Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s chairman, on Labor Day 2006. More recently he’s been trotting the globe –Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda; helping Oprah build her new TV network, OWN; and joining U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS.

Here’s part two of Tom Freston’s 2007 commencement speech at Emerson College. In yesterday’s post, the former Viacom (VIAB) CEO shared the story of the sudden turn in his storied media career. Here Freston explains the first two things “you’re going to want to be able to say you’ve done if ever you are called upon to impart wisdom upon the young.”

One. First and foremost: You’re going to want to be able to say that – “but for Joseph Campbell, my life would have been one of quiet desperation.”

And if you don’t know who Joseph Campbell is, don’t worry, I am about to tell you. For those of you who have not read his books or don’t watch a lot of PBS, he was a scholar, philosopher-guru, and the author of the Power of the Myth who famously pleaded with students to “follow your bliss.”

I am under no illusion that anything I might tell you could improve upon that. He believed that by pursuing the thing you love, you actually put yourself on the path that has always been intended for you and that you were therefore destined to succeed on that path.

Boy, there is so much truth in that! And sadly, most people never get this guiding principle. I had my first Joseph Campbell moment on the deck of a houseboat floating in Kashmir, India. I was on the tail end of my year-long travel odyssey, still tormented with the question “What would I love to do?”

Advertising had not been it. This time I did not want to settle for anything less than true love. It was such a beautiful evening and, looking out upon the incredible landscape, my bliss revealed itself to me: I loved India! I felt so alive there. Even though I was just a kid from Connecticut who had arrived on the subcontinent practically by mistake, I felt this strong connection to the people. And somehow I was certain I wanted to make a life there.

It seemed to offer everything I needed. Also, as luck would have it, the recent introduction of the 747 and low air-freight costs created all kinds of exciting import-export opportunities to explore. I took it as a sign.

Now, in choosing Emerson and being more focused, most of you are closer to your “bliss” than your average graduate at other colleges. Use that advantage to your maximum advantage. You’re at a place in your life where you can do any of a million things, but find what you can do better than anyone else. You may have to bob and weave a bit — and you may find yourself waiting tables at some point — but never settle for less than what you love.

Everything good in your life will spring from this. Talent is the gift God gave you and you have spent the last 20 years making that gift your own. Each of you was lucky to receive it and from here on out, the harder you work, the luckier you will become. Only true love can fuel the hard work that awaits you. When Joseph Campbell said to follow your bliss, I’m sure he meant: Don’t walk after it, but run.

So be prepared to sweat.

Two. You’re also going to want to say your path included a couple of sharp left turns. Or even better yet, an illegal U-turn.

Asia, travel and entrepreneurship, as it turned out, were just the first in a series of blisses for me. As you may or may not have learned about love by now, sometimes you change your mind and other times, someone changes it for you. Then what?

I came home from India only to be professionally reincarnated. It was a big blow to me, but I methodically sought out another “bliss” of mine: music. It was something I knew a lot about, cared a lot about, and had a passion for. Knowing I had transferable skills from my last career, I sold my entrepreneurial track record to a young outfit that needed entrepreneurs, MTV.

People often say that a bad event is a “blessing in disguise.” Trust me, experience will teach you that some are unbelievably well disguised. Everyone gets fired, or decides to make a radical change at some point. Everyone suffers setbacks. Bad days await you, I can promise you that.

But as careers unfold, you might just find you have another “bliss…and it’s OK.” You are certain to change with time and there’s a chance your bliss may evolve too. Not to worry: The skills you acquire can always be effectively redeployed. You will look back on setbacks and be grateful for a catalyst that came not a moment too soon.

Look at Al Gore. He won an election for the Presidency, only to immediately be told that, actually, there was a mistake and he wasn’t President after all. He got fired before he was even finished being hired. But look at what he’s accomplished since then: working hard to save a planet, for God’s sake, and even winning Academy Awards. Not to mention that he also guest-starred on Futurama. Now that’s an inspirational career adjustment!

Tomorrow, the third and final segment of Tom Freston’s speech: two more mandates for life, and a warning about what could happen if grads don’t follow his advice.

For more on Freston, read Pattie’s exclusive profile in the February 16 issue of Fortune, “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet.” Freston built MTV and rose to be CEO of Viacom, only to be dumped by Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s chairman, on Labor Day 2006. More recently he’s been trotting the globe – Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda; helping Oprah build her new TV network, OWN. He’s also working with U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS.

It’s that time of year, so we’re sharing one of our favorite commencement speeches with you: Tom Freston’s 2007  address at Emerson College.

Pattie Sellers’ exclusive profile of Freston, “The Most Wanted Man on the Planet,” tells the story of a man who had built MTV and Viacom’s (VIAB) vast cable empire, got fired by chairman Sumner Redstone, walked away with $60 million in severance –  and actually knew what do do with the money. Today, when he’s not trotting the globe — Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda, and beyond — Freston, 63, is helping Oprah Winfrey build her new TV network, OWN. He’s also working with U2 frontman Bono on his mission to reduce global poverty and AIDS.

This talk — which Freston gave at Emerson when his son Andrew was graduating — strikes us as one of the best commencement speeches we’ve heard besides Steve Jobs’ address at Stanford in 2005. Unlike that unforgettable speech by Apple’s (AAPL) founder, Freston’s talk has not been publicly circulated. Until now. We’ll post it on Postcards in three parts — today, tomorrow and Friday.

Good afternoon President Liebergott, distinguished faculty, fellow trustees, beaming parents and soon-to-be recent graduates of Emerson College. I am thrilled to be here and thank you for asking me to share with you one of the most important days of your lives. I feel like the proud father to all of you in general, and to one of you in particular. Hello Andrew. I remember how embarrassed I was when my father spoke at sixth grade Career Day, so I can imagine how you feel right now.

In preparing for these remarks, it dawned on me that it was exactly 40 years ago — almost to the day — that I graduated college and sat where you sit today. That was 1967, and it was a much different world. We were losing a senseless war in a far-away land. As a result of this war, anti-Americanism was rampant throughout the world. And here at home, this war had made our President wildly unpopular, to the point that the mere mention of his name would make crowds hiss and boo.

And it was right around this time in the upcoming presidential campaign that a lot of young people like me began rallying behind a Midwestern, anti-war senator who gave voice to our concerns. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s how different the world really was back then.

We had a commencement speaker at my graduation too — but of course, I cannot remember who it was or what this person said. Those words were drowned out by my own interior monologue. That I can still remember, word for word: “Dear God, what the hell am I going to do now?”

On the other side of that door that you are all about to walk through is the wild road of life. And that life is hardly ever what you expect. A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you.

Not only do I believe that, I have the resume to prove it. Down on the bottom of that resume are all the many random jobs I had early on: bartender, bellhop, waiter, mailman, burger flipper, house painter, dishwasher, lawn mower, store clerk, snow shoveler, deliveryman and more. I always hustled to make money and pay for school. I was never afraid of hard work. After college I went to business school.

After that I put some more odd jobs on my resume, traveled a bit, and ended up working in an ad agency on the G.I. Joe account at the height of the Vietnam War. It was like something from a Joseph Heller novel.

Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I was told I was about to be assigned to a new account and it could be Charmin Toilet Paper. Hearing that, I quit, took my $4000 of savings, headed to Paris, and began a year-long Bohemian odyssey that took me through Europe and North Africa. I ended up in India and Afghanistan — just about as far away from toilet paper as I could get. I stayed there and started a clothing-for-export company. Those years were both complicated and exhilarating. However, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and some other unforeseen complications put an abrupt end to what had been a great adventure. Eight years after I left New York and built a good business, I came home deep in debt.

Back in the states, I set out to change my luck. And my luck kicked in on the day I landed a job at an embryonic venture in cable television — the Internet start-up of its day — at a company that went on to be called MTV. MTV begot Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, TV Land, and so on, until they collectively became MTV Networks.

I stayed at MTV Networks, then Viacom, Paramount, and the rest of it for a full 26 years, building those creative businesses into huge global operations. I did that until last fall when the ax fell and, just like that, I no longer worked there. In any career, some days are better than others – and that day was an “other.” It’s ironic: Here I am giving a commencement speech when I’m back right where I started, wondering, like you, “Dear God – what the hell am I going to do now?”

So that’s my career story and how I ended up on this podium today. Sadly, since I was too busy having a panic attack when I was receiving the commencement speech at my graduation, I will never know if I missed out on any wise words I could have used in the 40 years since. Or the good example I could have put to use right now, on how to give a commencement speech.

And maybe something like this might happen to someone in this class 40 years from now. It could be you giving a commencement speech. Or you. Or you.

It could happen and, if it did, what would you say to the many confused faces staring back at you? So, for the benefit of whichever of you may someday follow in my footsteps as a commencement speaker, I’ve put together the shortest list possible…so timeless that it’s guaranteed to stay Mentos-fresh for the next 40 years. Some things you’re going to want to be able to say you’ve done if ever you are called upon to impart wisdom upon the young. So let’s start with the most basic and most important…

Tomorrow, the second segment of Freston’s speech: two pieces of advice for the next 40 years.

Where in the world is Gerry Laybourne? Last we heard, she sold Oxygen Media for almost $1 billion to General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal. The media-industry icon, who had built Viacom’s (VIAB) Nickelodeon before creating Oxygen, has been notably quiet since her mega-sale in the fall of 2007.

In fact, I didn’t know what Laybourne was up to until last week, when I ended up at her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Reason I was there: Laybourne invited the participants in this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership for idea-sharing on a variety of topics—business-building, creativity, women and power, the state of the universe. Each May, Laybourne meets with the mentees — rising-star women from across the developing world who come to the U.S. to shadow participants in the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. Every May, the mentees say that meeting with Laybourne is one of the highlights of their month-long U.S. visit.

So this year I went to the Laybourne powwow — and as I admitted to her last week, I went partly to find out where in the world she’s been. “India, Bhutan, the Amazon—places I never had time to go to,” Laybourne told the 32 women from across the globe. One of her favorite trips was to Namibia, she said. That’s home to two of this year’s 32 mentees.

Laybourne really sounded liberated to be out of a job. “I’m happy to be a broader global citizen than I was when I was a grunt of a businesswoman and had time [during a trip] only to go to the hotel or to the meeting.”

Not that she’s abandoning her career forever. Now is prime time for women leaders, she contends. “Men’s brains are bigger, but we have more pre-frontal cortex, so we make connections better.” And connections — collaborations, partnerships, joint ventures — are more critical to business and politics than ever.

So is being adaptable, since today more than ever, who knows what tomorrow will bring? Women may have an edge in that respect. “We keep a lot of open folders in our minds, which is why we drive men crazy,” she told the group. “I joke that Steve Jobs is part woman because he has such an intuitive way of thinking about things,” she said, professing her admiration for Apple (AAPL). (She’s an Amazon (AMZN) fan too. Loves her Kindle.)

Laybourne noted two areas where women aren’t too adept. “One is tooting your own horn,” she said. “Women are slaves to facts and don’t take risks as readily and trust their intuition.” She felt her own intuition blocked at Disney (DIS), where she spent a couple of years pre-Oxygen and felt that centralized control and over-analysis of ideas hampered creativity. “Eighty percent of business decisions get made on intuition,” she ventured.

Laybourne is trusting her gut — yes, her intuition — to lead her to her next gig. She wouldn’t say what it might be, but clearly she’s thinking about government as well as business. “I’m very excited by the Obama Administration,” she said, citing education, health care and infrastructure as three areas that particularly interest her. She has a screen saver on her computer that shows all the U.S. Presidents — 43 white guys — and then Barack Obama. “It’s a beautiful image,” she said. “I have so much hope, I can hardly stand it.”

Watch for Laybourne to reemerge. For a woman who wanted to be a city planner, became a teacher and then an entrepreneur, and ended up as one of the media world’s great pioneers, the world is open to her.