The painful politics of the Writers Guild

It's a lot easier to be a leftist when you're not on strike.

Contract talks between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke off Friday night in a furious argument over alleged future profits from the Internet and proposed union jurisdiction over reality show writers.

You have to feel for the writers who slogged for years through the morass of the television business and then, against all odds, were finally able to get a show on the air -- only to be asked to walk out on strike, with no guarantee that their series will go back into production when the strike finally ends.

Show business is so hard.

It doesn't make it any easier that these writers are being asked to stay on strike until the AMPTP grants the WGA jurisdiction over the writers of reality shows. Solidarity is nice in theory, but it's hard to lose your house for the sake of people you will never bump into in a restaurant. I mean, never.

Then there's this myth that the Internet is spitting gold coins into the pockets of everybody but the talent.

"I'm not going to be the chairman of the negotiating committee that gives away the Internet," the WGA's John F. Bowman told the Los Angeles Times, "There's an enormous burden of history here."

Fair enough, let's talk about history.

Back in the early 1990s, the Los Angeles Times thought it could set up a closed online network that would make the paper's content available only to paid subscribers who dialed in and provided a password. It wasn't long before the paper shut down the service and surrendered to the market, which expressed no interest in the content unless it was free on the open Internet.

In September, the New York Times ended the two-year experiment known as Times Select. It turned out that Internet users would rather skip Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman than pay a subscription fee to read them.

The Wall Street Journal still charges for full access to its web site, but parent company Dow Jones has been sold and you can expect that to change before too long, if it hasn't already.

Where is all this money everybody thinks the Internet is generating?

It's not in the newspaper business, which just had what Washington Post Company CEO Donald Graham called "not a good year for anybody." Industry executives continue to profess optimism about Internet profits in the future, but the numbers support a different interpretation: McClatchy's head of online operations reports year-to-date growth in ad revenue of just 0.8 percent, despite a 23 percent jump in unique visitors.

How often do you click on one of those ads?

Apparently not often enough to keep AOL's revenue from declining 38 percent and dragging Time Warner's third-quarter profits underwater. The company told Wall Street analysts that online ad growth was slowing and would continue to slow through the first quarter of next year.

And how's that Internet gold mine working out for the music industry? Is everybody getting rich off those peer-to-peer downloads? Have you stopped by Tower Records on Sunset lately? Plenty of free parking. No store, though.

There's certainly nothing wrong with the Writers Guild trying to establish a framework for paying writers when their work is used in new media. The question is, at what cost to members, and at what cost to the Guild itself?

How long will working writers sacrifice themselves on the altar of solidarity?

Maybe forever.

That's too bad.

Even Mikhail Gorbachev knew when it was time to sign with Louis Vuitton.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: The Los Angeles Times' excellent coverage of the WGA strike can be found here. You might also want to bookmark this link for the L.A. Times blog of strike news. Here are links to Friday night's statements from the AMPTP and from the WGA. Here's the story from the Wall Street Journal. All free of charge, of course.