 |
| Rehearsal: Musical guest Soulja Boy practices for 'Last Call with Carson Daly," on an outdoor stage in Burbank, Calif., before
the Writers Guild of America pickters arrived to protest as the WGA strike against motion picture and television producers
continued in this Nov. 29 photo. The Daly show was to become the first late-night talk show to defy the writers strike and
resume production. Reed Saxon |
Writers' strike: As reruns take over television, eyes shift to new media
As the Hollywood screenwriters' strike stretches into its fifth week, viewers, networks, and content creators all look to alternative outlets for fresh entertainment. Will they ever go back to mainstream media?
By Gloria Goodale and Daniel B. Wood | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 3, 2007 edition
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Los Angeles - Bill Jones says demand is up 30 percent in the past month for his Georgia-based Air2Web, which provides technology for cellphone users to cast votes for reality-show contestants.
Chris Spencer, head of Pittsburgh-based Wizzard Media, the largest podcast-hosting network, says downloads jumped 13 percent in the week after the Hollywood screenwriters' strike began and have continued "to spike up" since.
Angela Wilson Gyetvan, with the video-sharing website Revver, says the number of studios and production houses exploring partnerships rose 20 percent in November.
All three new-media mavens say they are beneficiaries of the four-week-old screenwriters' strike, as TV watchers tune into new options and as networks and studios seek ways to avoid dreaded reruns. While an explosion of unscripted game shows and reality shows is predictable, a more surprising result is the accelerated interest in new media, which may mature and move into the mainstream more speedily as a result, analysts say.
"A prolonged strike is an engraved invitation to new choices," says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California here.
For creators and viewers alike, those new choices include everything from quickie videos made on a cellphone camera and uploaded to videosharing websites like YouTube to festival-worthy independent films made by film school grads to audio and video podcasts made in the comfort of one's own basement or attic.
The opportunity for new media during this strike is comparable to the windfall experienced by cable and by a then-nascent fourth network, Fox, during the five-month writer's strike in 1988, say Professor Cole and others. But this time, the range of beneficiaries stretches from the relatively minor (presidential candidates who get a temporary reprieve from jabs on late-night TV) to the profound (a major boost to alternative media that could speed a shift already under way in global entertainment).
"The 'so what?' factor is huge," says Peter Lehman, director of the Center for Film, Media, and Popular Culture at Arizona State University. One result of the strike is to expose more people to user-created content on the Web and to direct more creative energies to that outlet, thereby underscoring the importance of the very same emerging entertainment models that are the sticking point in the current negotiations between writers and producers.
Labor negotiations were set to resume Tuesday. Late last week, the major Hollywood studios presented striking screenwriters with a new set of proposed pay formulas for digital media, but the writers' union rebuffed the offer as far too stingy, according to Reuters. The talks have foundered largely on the failure to reach accord on writers' demands for a greater share of revenue for film and TV work distributed over the Internet and wireless devices, such as cellphones.
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