Previously I argued that the television studios were going to be the big losers from the writers’ strike. Today’s NY Times reports a different angle on the unfolding battle. A powerful resurgence of unscripted “reality shows” has some questioning just how necessary writers are after all:
Time periods may be lost to scripted shows. If you’re a writer, you don’t want to kill that golden goose. CBS can fill three hours a week with ‘Big Brother’ for about five bucks.
The two perspectives actually aren’t incompatible. The real legacy of the writers’ strike may be a migration of scripted content to niche media, while the dwindling networks prop up their declining profit margins with cheap-to-produce unscripted fare. The question is how much staying power this stuff has, and whether its mass appeal is sufficient to sustain an increasingly irrational medium.
Tags: strike
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As part of my service to the Fractured Atlas community, I read a lot of boring finance and economics stuff so that you don’t have to. Among my favorite sources is The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz. Today Barry made some observations about our industry that are worth heeding:
[T]he writers strike has motivated the striking comedy writers to sit down with Venture Capitalists. The two groups are exploring new web based ways to reach comedy audiences, potentially bypassing the TV studios.
The TV studios have already lost. The VCs will find a business model that works on the cheap, and begin competing with the studios, even if the strike is settled tomorrow. I suspect that Television, as we know it, is now officially over.
I’m not sure I share his confidence in the wisdom (or even business savvy) of venture capitalists, but I do believe we’ve been witnessing the slow death of mass market media for a long time now, and this may well accelerate that process.
Such a huge portion of the Fractured Atlas membership is already involved in D.I.Y. approaches to art-making. Further movement away from consolidated producer/distributor power can only be a positive thing, for artists and their audiences alike.
Tags: D.I.Y., strike
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