The Writers' Strike
From the Huffington Post:
"Film and TV writers prepared to go on strike Monday for the first time in two decades to break what has become a high-stakes stalemate with the world's largest media companies over profits from DVDs and programming on the Internet. . . During the 1988 writers strike, Letterman, then host of NBC's "Late Night," and longtime "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson initially went off the air but later returned as the walkout dragged on for 22 weeks and cost the industry about $500 million. Daytime TV, including live talk shows such as "The View" and soap operas, which typically tape about a week's worth of shows in advance, would be next to feel the impact.Dear god, I'm sure the sophisticated logistics it will take to keep THE VIEW's savage creativity operating at peak intellectual capacity will be staggering.
We full time dot-com bloggers (I've been doing it for eight years now) would love to strike for such luxuries as direct deposit or yearly raises, if we weren't already a hair away from being replaced by a line of digg-style code and/or an overweight teenager from Akron willing to work for a free ham sandwich.
You Hollywood writers think you have it tough? Try writing every day on the Internet with an open comment section that invites the nation's most bat-shit insane housebound verbal pugilists to launch verbal diarrhea on your work. I've had death threats in real time for criticizing people's favorite graphics card manufacturer, while you were gabbing it up with the cast of As the World Turns. and lamenting that you're not getting additional YouTube revenue.
You folks in push media have it easy. Let me write the View for a few weeks. My first episode is already scripted out, and involves re-animating the corpse of the late Bill Hicks, and unleashing him on your panel of lobotomized mall victims for a full hour.