Writers' Strike, 11/12.

James Surowiecki looks to the history of labor walkouts and explains, in his view, "why the longer a strike lasts, the less likely it is to produce a big victory for either side: you're willing to cut a deal after a long strike that you wouldn't have been willing to cut before in part because the strike has told you that the other side wasn't just bluffing.... A strike isn't always a mistake: sometimes workers do win big. But if both sides think a strike will help their cause at least one of them must be wrong."

Updated.

Also in the New Yorker, Larry Doyle jokes around.

"It was actually pretty upbeat. There was music, I saw people I knew and there was a spirit in the air." That's picketing screenwriter Bradford Winters, as quoted by David Carr. And that was the first week. As now we enter the second week, Michael Cieply brings news that things may turn a little less jovial. "Do Movies Make Money?" is a "report, prepared by the research company Global Media Intelligence in association with its partner Merrill Lynch, [which] concludes that much of the income - past and future - that studios and writers have been fighting about has already gone to the biggest stars, directors and producers in the form of ballooning participation deals."

Also in the New York Times, Joanne Kaufman notes, "The strike - over whether producers and studios can profit from the writers' work on the Web without paying them specifically for it to appear there - has so outraged guild members that in some cases they are writing on the Web, free, about how they don't want to write on the Web free."

How many episodes has your favorite TV show got before it either slips into reruns or off the air completely? Not as many as you might think. The Los Angeles Times has a chart.

Meantime, Nikki Finke holds out a "glimmer of hope."

Update: CNBC's Jim Goldman's nabbed some terrific quotes from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: "So imagine you're a major media mogul... You're faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media... to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games... Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales...?" That was last week. Today, Andreessen's got a followup entry: "Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's image."

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2007 7:42 AM