"At the heard of the writers strike, a tangled web"

I’m doing a little web surfing this morning before getting ready for the NCTE– perhaps the last time I’ll be online on this trip since I don’t expect to be back here until later tonight, and since I’d have to pay another $10 for internet access for that time, I think I’ll probably wait to post any thoughts about the conference until Saturday night from home.

In any event, while surfing, I came across this article from the Chicago Tribune, “At the heart of the writers strike, a tangled Web.” It’s interesting stuff to me as a writer and a “technology guy,” and I can imagine that this strike will be something worthy of study in the future. Here’s a quote:

As the screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”) says in an explanatory video at United Hollywood (unitedhollywood.blogspot.com), a quasi-official strike blog, “This is our generation’s moment.”

The writers union gave in to producers and took a pay cut when royalty rates for home-video sales were being negotiated in the 1980s, he says, and it was a huge mistake to compromise merely because it was an unproven business. Now, the issue is another fledgling business, the Internet, threatening to again change the means by which people get their entertainment.

“I don’t want, 30 years from now, writers looking back at us, saying, ‘What were these clowns thinking about? How could they not know that the digital revolution was everything?’ ” Robinson says.

But now I gotta get ready for the teacher-type gig.

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