Agents bring around plates of churros for the writers!
(Imagine Advertisers Here)
The WGA strike comes at a very interesting point in time, as a major paradigm shift is happening in the music industry, right in front of our eyes but a little tiny bit before the same paradigm shift is as clear in the TV and film industry. Try this mental exercise and I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Right now, the studios seem to have all the power and they are acting like it. They refuse to negotiate on the issues, their industry leaders are publicly calling the strike stupid, and now they’ve begun playing hardball by laying off or firing production personnel. Meanwhile the writer’s chant and march in picket lines with no apparent response from the corporate powers. Everyone knows that the studios have the upper hand, and so everyone is anticipating a long and painful standoff.
But where does that studio power come from? They used to get their power because they had a more or less exclusive monopoly on bringing media content into the homes of millions of people. While the studios act like the digital revolution is some distant, far off potentiality in fact right now, there are plenty of different ways to get media content to people. Aside from the Internet and iTunes and YouTubee and half a dozen other things you’ve already thought of, services like TiVo and providers like the cable and satellite companies can already bypass the networks. The studio stranglehold on content delivery is over — not sometime in the future — but right this minute.
So the studios are a middleman between the content creators (like the people in the WGA) and the advertisers.
What happens when the people in the WGA and the advertisers both realize this? What would happen if Procter & Gamble, or Toyota or Google started showing up at the picket lines with churros, doughnuts and interesting ideas about how everybody could make money? What would happen if writers put on their picket signs and started walking away from the studios, engaged in animated discussions with the advertisers? Would those corporate towers look powerful or suddely barren?
You don’t see Radiohead picketing outside record companies asking for a few more pennies per copy of album sold. You don’t see Madonna asking if she could please have some of the revenue from iTunes downloads. You don’t see the Bare Naked Ladies watching their sound crew and roadies laid off and wondering how they’re going to eat in six months.
And even right now, you don’t see Rosie O’Donnell giving a damn if her MSNBC deal fell through. Rosie doesn’t need MSNBC. MSNBC could really use Rosie. But she said recently, she doesn’t need to be lectured to by corporate types, as she was after talking about the potential deal in public. The people doing the lecturing apparently thought they were the ones who held the power position. Guess again.
Here’s a related post I wrote before the strike began about power, TV and online media.
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November 12th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
You might also try looking at this issue in reverse. Labor organization only works in relatively centralized industries with just a few large employers. But the digital age is utterly transforming the landscape of the traditional media model. How do you enforce a union deal with everybody who owns a camcorder and a laptop? How do you prevent scabs in India, or Middletown, USA, from working for less than “guild minimum” on their YouTube video? The democratization of media (which is what is going on here) will not translate into stronger bargaining power for writers. It will, however, mean for a more open system over all, or rather, the unraveling of any “system” at all. The studios and the WGA are both dinosaurs who just don’t know they’re extinct yet, while the YouTubers are those funny little hairy “mammals” scrambling around their giant plodding feet.
November 12th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
You raise a good point. I think the role of the WGA could (and probably should) change. Picture them as a go-between for contract enforcement between writers and advertisers.