My colleague over at Tuned In is supposed to be on vacation. But he has apparently slapped together some timed posts to appear in his absence, making the rest of us bloggers who mean to slack off on upcoming holidays look very, very bad. So I hereby shall steal his thunder by blogging on his beat about the TV writers’ strike.
If I lived in L.A., I would so go out and join the picket line on my lunch break. I’m not a TV writer, and I’m not a member of the Guild. But look at the celeb power! Consider the photo ops! Throngs of tourists and paparazzi should show up today between 12 and 2 outside Universal. According to UnitedHollywood.com, a blog by strike captains (not to be confused with Hollywood United, which is a football club), these are the stars walking the oval today:
Army Wives – Kim Delaney, Brian McNamara, Sally Pressman, Drew Fuller, Wendy Davis, Sterling K. Brown, Brigid Brannagh
The Big Bang Theory – Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Jim Parsons
Big Love – Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Brotherhood – Ethan Embry, Fionnula Flanagan, Kevin Chapman
Corey in the House – Rondell Sheridan, Madison Pettis, Lisa Arch, Maira Walsh
Cold Case – Thom Barry, John Finn, Tracie Thoms, Meredith Stiehm, Danny Pino
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Archie Kao, Marc Vann, Wallace Langham, Liz Vassey, David Berman, John Wellner
Desperate Housewives – Doug Savant, Nicollette Sheridan, Dana Delany, Tuc Watkins
Dexter – Keith Carradine, James Remar, C.S. Lee
Dirt – Ian Hurt, Josh Stewart
Everybody Loves Raymond – Ray Romano
The Game – Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall
George Lopez Show – George Lopez, Constance Marie, Valente Rodriguez
Grey’s Anatomy – Katherine Heigl, T.R. Knight, KaDee Stickland, Amy Brenneman, Justin Chambers
Jericho – Ashley Scott, Bob Stephenson
Kyle XY – Jamie Alexander, April Matson, Chris Olivero, Bruce Thomas
Las Vegas – Vanessa Marcil
Mad Men – January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser, Rich Sommer
My Boys – James Kaler
New Adventures of Old Christine – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Clark Gregg, Hamish Linklater, Alex Kapp Horner, Tricia O’Kelley
Numb3rs – Dylan Bruno, Diane Farr
Private Practice – Kate Walsh
The Riches – Minnie Driver
Rules of Engagement – Patrick Warburton, Megyn Price, Oliver Hudson, Bianca Kajlich
‘Til Death – Brad Garrett, Kat Foster
True Blood – Anna Paquin, Sam Trammell
Wildfire – Lori Loughlin
Without A Trace – Poppy Montgomery, Enrique Murciano
Women’s Murder Club – Scott Gemmill, Paula Newsome, Laura Harris
Wow! And scrolling down the list, I find my blood chilling at the thought of a whole season without these shows. What will I do without my Army Wives? How will I live without Big Love?
I don’t mean to make light of the situation. The TV writers’ strike is making me think long and hard about how writers in other mediums are compensated. Methinks we journalists can learn a lot from their demands.
More and more, the content we produce appears on the web, which our employers are trying their darndest to monetize. They’ll succeed; that’s not in doubt. So how ought we, the content providers, position ourselves to get a fair slice of the pie?
Take freelance writers. A major magazine like TIME might pay up to $3 a word for an article to appear in print. So this blog post might have yielded me $2,268. Not bad, right? TIME.com, on the other hand, pays far less.
For the time being, this makes sense. Advertisers pay far more to appear in the glossy pages of our magazine than they do on our web site. Plus, readers pay to subscribe to our magazine and read it for free online. But our web readership is exploding. More advertisers are lured to its younger, more international readers. I presume marketers also like the creativity and interactivity the medium allows for their ads, and their ability to measure response. My money’s on the web site catching up to the print magazine as a desirable place to advertise someday soon. That means ad rates can creep up.
Shouldn’t content producers then be able to negotiate compensation differently? If my blog attracts, say, 30,000 readers per week, then that means 30,000 people view the ads along the top and sides of my page. Perhaps I could be paid a fraction of the ad rate. That would motivate me to create ever more exciting content to draw more eyeballs, which would draw more advertisers, which would boost site revenue. We all win. No?
Here’s a clip featuring the writers and actors from The Office picketing outside what looks like a gated residential complex. Which is weird. But maybe there’s a studio across the street. Anyway, the writers talk about how they were made to write some webisodes that have since been viewed millions of times on NBC.com and that even earned them a Daytime Emmy—and that they were not compensated for. Because, you know, it’s on the web, where nobody makes any money.