Writer's Strike Thread

[Y&RWorldTurner]

McTavish is apart of the WGA and is on strike, so no, Sony and CBS can't legally hire her, so it isn't true.

Anyway, I also hope AMC can get a new HW and EP out of this strike. B&E have managed to do something McTavish never did - bring AMC to last place in the ratings. AMC is truly the worst and most unrecognizable soap on the air at the moment, and that's saying something. I also get the feeling that TPTB don't want this show to recover, I feel like Frons is just itching to cancel it.

[Khan]

Actually, Frons is probably itching to cancel AMC and OLTL, whack the rest of the veterans on GH, and spin Sonny and Jason off into their own, new show.

[Faulkner]

Amen to that. Carruthers is the common denominator between the McTavish and B&E stints. Plus, she's responsible for that horrendous shaky-cam period in the show's history. The woman is poison.

[EricMontreal22]

Carruthers at best has just shown ZERO vision or direction for the show. Often I think it's actually an EP who helps point the writer in the right direction

[R Sinclair]

Unless you're on a crack high, you don't hire a writing team that has written numerous shows into cancellation in hopes of SAVING a show.

[brimike]

Not sure if this was posted already and I missed it, but did anyone catch Carolyn Hinsey's completely back-asswards write-up on the strike in SOD? I don't know why I'm surprised. The woman has turned being wrong into a career.

While she's not wrong about the damage that can/will be done to daytime if the strike continues, how can she say the internet isn't affecting soaps? Days is on iTunes! All the CBS soaps are up on CBS.com WITH commercials (hence, advertising revenue). And NBC is now producing ONLINE SOAP OPERAS!!!!

Man, pass me what she's smoking...

[stenbeck212]

I know Hinsey didn't say that. I just know she didn't. I can believe her committed ignorance about Jax's rape on GH, but not that she works in the soap press and has NO idea that soaps are on the web now. I'm dreaming, right?

[bellcurve]

Hinsey's statements regarding the strike and that soap scribes should be exempt from a battle that potentially affects them(INTERNET!) is not only ignorant, but it shows that she gets off on making blind statements that piss people off.

If soaps did die out, at least it would eliminate the need for her stupid columns, along with the rest of her asskissing peers at Weekly and Digest.

I've been officially over that cow for awhile now.

[bellcurve]

Hinsey's statements regarding the strike and that soap scribes should be exempt from a battle that potentially affects them(INTERNET!) is not only ignorant, but it shows that she gets off on making blind statements that piss people off.

If soaps did die out, at least it would eliminate the need for her stupid columns, along with the rest of her asskissing peers at Weekly and Digest.

I've been officially over that cow for awhile now.

[Vee]

And of course, nothing will happen to her for writing something patentedly false.

Why? Because the soap rags are "just" the soap rags. It's "just" soap journalism. Nobody can be expected to care or bother getting anything right. She'll come back with "so I might've been slightly off in my comments about the strike - what can I do, I'm Carolyn Hinsey, it's just my opinion, lemme lone, yada yada yada! Now, about Maurice..."

I am so sick of that [!@#$%^&*].

[Sylph]

November 26, 2007

Alternative Journalist’s Web Site Is Scrutinized for Writers’ Strike News

By BRIAN STELTER

When some striking members of the Writers Guild of America created a series of videos depicting speechless actors in support of the writers’ cause, they did not post them on the guild’s Web site or on YouTube. Instead, the videos made their premiere exclusively on Deadline Hollywood Daily, a Web site owned and operated by Nikki Finke, a columnist for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly.

Since she began the site in 2006, Ms. Finke’s Web site has become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls.

But it has been the screenwriters’ strike that may have finally solidified her position as a Hollywood power broker. For this article, more than a dozen executive producers, writers and agents offered to attest to her influence. But with those plaudits also come complaints — only anonymous ones — that Ms. Finke plays favorites.

“Like it or not, everyone in Hollywood reads her,” said Brad Grey, the chief executive of Paramount and, like many executives, an occasional target of Ms. Finke’s scathing reports. “You must respect her reach.”

For many of her readers, Ms. Finke’s Web site has supplanted traditional media as a primary source of strike news. Before the strike, Ms. Finke said Deadline Hollywood Daily averaged 350,000 page views a day. Since the beginning of the strike, she said the daily average had soared to about a million.

Ms. Finke said the size of the audience began to sink in when Bill Wrubel, a writer for the ABC series “Ugly Betty,” started a chant on the picket lines outside Raleigh Studios comparing her with two other industry publications, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

“Variety and The Reporter stink. We get our news from Nikki Finke,” Mr. Wrubel chanted.

Ms. Finke, who works from her Los Angeles town house, has repeatedly assailed coverage by other outlets, particularly Variety, for, she maintains, running articles slanted toward the studios’ interests.

“They have been reporting stories that are fantastical,” Ms. Finke said in an interview. “What they are doing is kind of old-fashioned fear mongering.”

Dozens of readers responded to her post, saying they were canceling their Variety subscriptions.

Tim Gray, the editor of Variety, said his colleagues are used to criticism. “There is constant noise from bloggers,” he acknowledged, “but we just tend to our business and check our facts.”

Ms. Finke’s criticism of Variety has opened her to accusations that she is siding with the writers. She strongly disagrees, and said she has repeatedly reached out to the studios to include their points of view. As a columnist, Ms. Finke expressed opposition to a strike, writing on Oct. 16 that posting on a labor action is something “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

However, since the strike began, Ms. Finke has published 142 posts about it. She said she had worked almost around the clock for three weeks, and had fallen asleep at the computer four times. She estimated she had received 2,000 e-mail messages a day.

“It’s been brutal, but it’s also been exhilarating because I love news. I love it — a scoop is better than sex,” she said.

Ms. Finke, a onetime debutante in New York City, honed her journalism skills at The Associated Press, working in London and Moscow — “covering Hollywood is no different than covering the Kremlin,” she said — before stints at Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer, New York magazine and The New York Post. She was fired from The Post in 2002 after writing negative articles about Disney; she sued the newspaper’s parent News Corporation and settled for an undisclosed amount.

After years of writing about media corporations for media corporations, Ms. Finke said she now feels an incredible independence.

“I don’t think I’m a better journalist than anybody else,” she said. “I don’t think I’m a harder-working journalist than anybody else. I do think I have a forum where I have more freedom than anybody else.”

To a lesser extent, national newspapers and Los Angeles television stations have also fallen under Ms. Finke’s microscope. Calling them “newsosaurs,” she argues that major media outlets are wary of being too tough on studios because they benefit from movie and television advertising.

Ms. Finke benefits from their advertising indirectly, as LA Weekly pays for the right to place banner ads on her Web site. She would not comment on how much she makes from the site, only that she doesn’t “live the high life.”

“Her influence cannot be overstated,” said Jon Robin Baitz, executive producer of the ABC drama “Brothers and Sisters,” calling her “perhaps the greatest Kremlinologist and reader of tea leaves” in Hollywood.

Justin Stangel, a head writer for “The Late Show With David Letterman,” summarized the sentiment on his strike blog, saying: “I feel like I am having an affair with Nikki Finke. I am spending much more time with her than my wife.”

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[dragonflies]

Hinsey is an idiot, I believe she really is that clueless

IMO Frons hired B&E to shut up his bosses "See I got rid of McTavish like you said" ugh

[Ryan]

Carolyn Hinsey......she's what's wrong with the soap business now. She placates the networks, refusing to criticize then when she actually should, yet she chastises the fans for doing so. I'm so sick of her and her useless freakin opinion. I wouldn't use her column to wipe my rear......

I'm so sick of people who have the power (even remotely) to shine the light on the things the networks do wrong, doing nothing. She has an outlet that reaches out to a couple million people, and yet all she does is stroke the networks like a whore making rent.

People on the internet are accused of being rabid and negative. Some are, but for the most part, being critical now is being considered negative. Knowing that things have to get worse before they get better, and wanting things to change are now considered "bad" among some fans. Why? Because they are perfectly content with the way things are. Perfectly content watching the substandard, asshat agenda based writing, that pimps their faves, while alienating the audience who likes more than just "the chosen."

I'm so sick of this [!@#$%^&*].....

[dragonflies]

Ryan you rock my socks

[Chris B]

I don't think Hinsey's comments are that ridiculous. People keep saying the internet is the future of soaps, but I think that is a load of crap. Yes, we'll get crap like L.A. Diaries and Coastal Dreams, but is anybody on this site watching them? I bet the nets are LOSING money on those two soaps. If anything, we'll have more internet soaps like that, geared towards tweens.

We will never see any of the current soaps exclusively on the internet. It would make the budget cuts for PSNS and GL look like a blockbuster movie budget. Plus, do you see Susan Lucci, Maurice Benard, Kim Zimmer, Maura West, Susan Flannery or Eric Braeden doing an internet soap? Absolutely ridiculous.

If soaps can't make it on network or cable, they're dead. I'm sure the PGP Soap Channel will continue, so ATWT & GL fans can continue to enjoy their soaps. The rest? Forget it. If studios won't release soaps on DVD while they're on the air and can cross promote, they won't do it after they were cancelled for lack of interest.

I'd be willing to bet they're making pennies off of the CBS soaps streaming. I hope the writers get their fair share, but if daytime writers suspect anything significant , they're nuts. THis fight is good for them if they plan to go into primetime and film, but it will never been a soap fight, IMO. In the end, after they split it between 10 writers, they'll probably have a check for $5.