Who Won the Writers Strike?

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NYT: News Analysis
Who Won the Writers Strike?
By DAVID CARR
Published: February 12, 2008

When the Writers Guild of America held its annual awards ceremony Saturday night in Manhattan, it felt more like a victory celebration. So after a long and bitter strike, the writers won, right? On points, yes, probably. On principle, certainly. From a practical perspective, maybe not so much.

True, the writers guild was able to wrest a major concession from management — winning a piece of digital revenues — the kind of victory that has largely eluded organized labor in the past few years....It is equally true, however, that the strike was bad for writers in the short term. The delays caused by the strike prompted the studios to ask themselves a fundamental question about the need to finance all manner of pilots for a traditional upfront extravaganza followed by a traditional introduction in the fall. That system, fairly unchanged through the years, has historically been lucrative for writers.

Emboldened by the strike, the studios severed existing contracts with writers, successfully turned over more of their prime-time schedules to reality programming and vowed to hold the line on filming new shows for next season. Some 70 development deals in which writers were essentially paid lucrative stipends to come up with shows that might not ever be broadcast are now gone, and they will not be coming back any time soon.

The events are likely to bring at least a few lean years to the workaday writers. With less spending on pilots, established writers will be in the hunt because they lost their cushy deals on the lot. With increased incursion from all forms of reality programs, finding work that pays the bills, never mind the residuals, is going to be a slog....

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One of the longer-term consequences of the strike that studios will now have to deal with is a group that is remarkably united — from the show runners in possession of lucrative deals to mostly unemployed writers fighting to get into the business....

Still, the question remains for the writers: will the piece of future digital revenues they captured be worth the grief endured these past few months? It won’t be in the near future. Advertisers are so much less valuable on the Web, and the real money remains in so-called legacy media. The negotiating committee for the writers is proud that they were able to establish a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, but that win will be largely symbolic unless there is a fundamental change in the economics of digital distribution....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/arts/television/12strike.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin