Just adding my two cents to the festivities.

I’ve been following the Hollywood writers’ strike a bit. In one sense, it’s a side issue for Blindside, since it doesn’t affect government IA. But on the other hand…the concentrated power of media conglomerates does affect IA. In theory, the bigger the media conglomerate the more able it *should* be to keep government honest - its traditional “Fourth Estate” role. But in practice what happens is safe choices, cut budgets for news reporting and “difficult” films and TV shows, and corporate pandering. I don’t think any of these things do society any favors. More than that, the WGA/AMPTP battle is, again, about copyright and royalties. If ever there were a situation that proved the utter hypocrisy of the RIAA/MPAA claim that their attacks on file-sharing and pursuit of copyright extension are about getting the artists paid, this is it. We hear a different story come contract time.

Journalists lost the battle to participate in the revenue stream from electronic media more than ten years ago; publishers began demanding all-rights contracts sometime in the mid-1990s. Photographers are in dire trouble from similar demands by Corbis and Getty, and are being squeezed by the mass of amateur material on Flickr, as this recent piece by Andrew Brown talks about (and this earlier one of mine also). Hollywood writers are essentially holding the fort for the rest of us - and it’s notable that the only big-league TV production company that is actually owned by its creators, that is, David Letterman’s World Wide Pants, is also the only organization that has reached an agreement with the WGA. Letterman’s competitors can’t do it: their shows are owned by their networks, and they themselves are studio employees. The official strike blog notes that the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns has estimated that acceding to the WGA’s demands would have a “negligible” impact on the studios’ bottom line. But acceding to the AMPTP’s demands, so that creators do not share in the revenues from tomorrow’s mainstream media will have an enormous impact on the cultural landscape for the rest of us.

wg
P.S. Wondering how many episodes you’ll get to see of your favorite shows this year? Try TV Guide’s handy list.