The Never-Ending Story: The Writers’ Strike Continues
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 10, 2007 at 12:02 AM PT
With the entertainment industry reeling from weakness brought on by changing viewers’ watching habits due to the Internet, the news of the talks to end the writers’ strike collapsing on Friday can’t be a good thing for Hollywood.
With the strike now in its sixth week, the studio reps–the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers–and the Writers Guild of America took aim at each other at a Los Angeles hotel, accusing the other side of negotiating in bad faith and being uncooperative.
The two sides still appear far apart on a lot of issues, including unionization of reality shows, but a lot of the issues center on how to split up revenues from new media.
Of course, most of those revenues from the Internet–via downloading and streaming, for example–are still tiny, so the two sides are essentially arguing over nothing, except that that nothing might be something someday.
Got it? (Kind of like Facebook being worth $15 billion!)
In honor of News Corp. officially getting ownership of Dow Jones this week, here’s a recent take from Headzup on the strike from the perspective of AllThingD.com’s new boss (Welcome, Rupe!):
