The Writers Guild strike is likely to backfire. While I understand the historic significance of unions, I think they serve very little, if any, purpose in the U.S. today.
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The Writers Guild strike is likely to backfire. At a time when there is no clear successful economic model for distributing content online, but plenty of folks who think they are creative and now have a platform to establish their ten minutes of fame, there is inherent risk in a strike. I am reminded of a time, probably more than ten years ago, that a media company elected to stop publishing their daily metropolitan newspaper as a response to a labor strike. Rather than the public outcry they expected, which they thought would help them in their negotiations, readers found other ways to access news and the paper folded.

The void that could potentially be created by a strike of any length will lead to multiple experiments with user generated content, whether comedic sketches for Leno or Letterman as well as alternative story lines to well known shows. Production is likely to be more amateur, but today's youth seemingly has no issue with that. I can envision the networks creating contests to get viewers involved and getting added publicity as well as a closer connection to viewers. The Andy Milonakis show, while far from my favorite, came about from a homemade video virally distributed via the Web.

I am not suggesting that the quality of television would be the same, but I do think the Writers Guild are giving consumers a reason to experiment and go elsewhere. It might prove fatal as a certain portion might not return. For no other reason than perhaps a good fight, I also feel the need to state my bias. While I understand the historic significance of unions, I think they serve very little, if any, purpose in the U.S. today.

So, in essence, if I were the Writers Guild, I would be afraid, very afraid.

Read more about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.

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