Who’s Afraid of a Writers Strike?
The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Tonight Show, and Late Night with David Letterman all are threatened with immediate lockjaw if the writers go on strike.
The Writers Guild has 12,000 members, not all of them active. But most writers in America are bloggers — millions of us. So to cast this news coverage in its proper scale, let’s look at how the strike might affect a typical blog. Ours.
How will the strike impact The Horse You Rode In On?
It’s complicated. Unresolved disputes in the Writers Guild strike revolve around how revenues and profits are to be apportioned among the creators, the spokespeople, and the distributors or media owners.
Since each of us at The Horse occupies all of these roles, negotiations tend to be chaotic.
Still, we’re not that far apart. All three parties have agreed on the basic numbers. Revenues are zero. Profits are zero. The question is how to split these infinite sums among the three writers/owners/media czars.
Then there’s the issue of pension benefits. We’re all agreed that they’re desirable.
Revenues are non-existent because, as a matter of principle, we don’t accept advertising. Should an advertiser ever show up and ask, we might re-examine our principles, especially if the ads in question were to favor impeachment of Bush/Cheney or to oppose abstinence.
Other sources of revenue for media empires such as ours would include selling lists of members or subscribers, but we give our readers the ironclad privacy protection of having no idea who they are.
Then there are the potential box office revenues on films made from our posts, foreign rights, endorsements, and merchandise like coffee mugs and T-shirts. How we’ve escaped such windfalls is beyond us.
Our best guess is that a strike would have little effect on us because all three writers would cross the picket line. If they could find one.
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Fine points, all, and Horse should certainly be commended for it’s hard-hooved stand on ethics.
However, it misses the point that it’s fairly confusing to hear that when writers go on strike there aren’t battalions of hungry freelancers knocking the strikers over like bowling pins to get to paying work. What ever happened to picking scabs (so to speak)? Going on strike just isn’t what it used to be.
Comment by Arthur2 — November 6, 2007 @ 6:07 pm
You’re right, Arthur. Scabs should be arriving by the busload, and striking writers should be slashing the bus tires and plopping potatoes into the tailpipes. Pinkerton men should be coming by barge. Roger Ayles should be burned in effigy, strike or no strike. Where is America’s spunk, spittle, and pluck when the scabs are crossing the picket lines via e-mail and the strikers all have liberal arts degrees? We’re all going soft, which raises another question: are all those Cialis commercials going to be financed to appear on re-runs?
Comment by Al — November 6, 2007 @ 9:40 pm