Christian Science Monitor: December 03, 2007 edition
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 Monitor
Los Angeles
....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....The role of new media is at the heart of the strikers' demands, many observers note. "It is quite ironic that the biggest beneficiary of the strike right now is the very thing they're striking over," says Jen Grogono, cofounder and chief content officer of ON Networks, an online video site based in Austin, Texas....
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1203/p01s01-ussc.htm 
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