What is Digg?192 Comments
- redwire, on 12/31/2007, -1/+38The correct term is "*****".
- Itazura, on 12/31/2007, -1/+37Have you seen how many hours of Mad TV are on that channel? Comedy Central doesn't care if their shows have good writers or are funny.
- travistubbs, on 12/31/2007, -1/+36I think we're all missing the point here. You have to remember that writers are not the only people that work on the show. There are cameramen, stylist, lighting, the people in the control room, and plenty of other people that work on shows like these. Although Stewart is doing his best to pay these people, he won't be able to keep on doing it.
Getting the show back on the air is the only way to make advertisers happy, thus providing income for the show to be able to pay everyone that works on it. Yes, going to air without the writers may not be the best move as the feel of the show will change, but at the same time, the writers understand that they aren't the only people that make a show happen.
I support the writers and their cause, but stop thinking of just one group. There's a big team effort to put on daily programming and everyone doesn't deserve to lose their job because of one group. - CiDaemon, on 12/31/2007, -1/+28Dugg for the sad truth: "Hey we all know these don't work, but they sure do make you feel better."
- Tomboys, on 12/31/2007, -5/+31That show has some of the best writers on TV. What are they thinking trying to move forward without them?
- bamafun, on 12/31/2007, -7/+25I think it will be a PR nightmare if they try to force Stewart back this way!
- Jareth86, on 12/31/2007, -1/+15Stewart used to do standup, he can manage on his own. It will be much harder for him though, and the show will have a completely different feel...
By the same token however, the longer he stays off the air, the more BS Washington and the msm gets away with unnoticed. - Gabberwok, on 12/31/2007, -1/+15All I know is that I fear for the sake of the country if we don't have Jon Stewart making fun of the candidates for this upcoming election. Someone's got to knock them down a peg...
- Waskonator, on 12/31/2007, -0/+12Im sitting at work... working! And you are saying its new years eve and you are drunk. Gah... I hate time zones.
- DocGlass, on 12/31/2007, -3/+14Writers want a fair share of their product. They are the people who create the content that makes their employers profit. They are paid with a percentage of that profit, and they only want a percentage of the online profits. Their employers tell them that no one knows how much money is being made online while at the same time they tell their shareholders how many millions are being made online. Just because you accept profit one way doesn't mean that is how every creative person should accept profit.
- katiedogg, on 12/31/2007, -1/+11Dude, the show is coming back without the writers. Read the post already.
- wattznext, on 12/31/2007, -6/+16Did the guy who got you to subscribe to these show also sell you a bridge in Brooklyn?
- eridius, on 12/31/2007, -5/+15Buried because that really is the truth - online petitions are a complete waste of time.
- bjornski, on 12/31/2007, -1/+10So maybe music should work the same way.
Once you "sell" your music to the studios, you don't get jack ***** from that point on. No royalties for you! - mytruckhasdents, on 12/31/2007, -3/+12they should force carlos mencia on....that way everyone can see he's a hack/thief.
- charlietuna, on 12/31/2007, -0/+9You got dugg down by a rabid pack of tweens I suspect. Okay, I will spell it out. Letterman owns his show though his holding company "World Wide Pants", John Stewart, and Colbert do not own their respective shows, thus they cannot negotiate a contract with "their" writers.
- darkane, on 12/31/2007, -0/+9The truth comes out. The entire writers strike is a government conspiracy to make sure the republican candidates can't be made fun of by Stewart/Colbert!
- Humptydank, on 12/31/2007, -0/+8The reason why writers and other artists are paid on a salary plus royalty basis is because that structure is beneficial to the studios, not the writers. They wanted to pay writers less for new, untested shows, and gave up a piece of the back end for that privilege.
Highly successful long-term franchises create quite a bit more economic benefit that those that fall flat, and the writers that create them are more valuable than those that don't. The problem is that no one knows what show is going to be a highly successful long-term franchise and what won't, even if you've had successes in the past. Such is the fickle nature of television.
So the studio wants the best of both worlds, they want to pay you like a day-rate writer, but are faced with writers (especially the best ones) saying, "No, I want much more than that, because this could be worth a fortune to you."
Faced with having no good writers or having to pay large upfront costs for a show that could easily go nowhere, the studios created the royalty system. Writers become participants, where they are paid a salary rate to start the show, but if the show takes off then they get a piece of the back end. So it's the studios that have significantly benefited from this system by having substantially lowered costs on what is their biggest and most enduring product: failed shows.
In this case, the studios have been stacking the deck. They have been adding new back-end revenue sources for content, but pretending that it has nothing to do with the royalty deals with the writers. They are saying, as Jon Stewart characterized it, "New media?! We don't know what's going too happe...I mean are we even making any mo...It's all so NEW!!"
You can't have both worlds -- writers would be just as happy to be paid a day rate and no royalties (probably more so for the bulk of working writers), but it would have to be a day rate that reflects the fact that for every ten "Cop Rocks" they produce they also produce a "Seinfeld," and the studios have already shown they don't like those upfront economics very much. - thefirstenemy, on 12/31/2007, -1/+9The Shcmaily Schmow I think has always had better political commentary, but has never quite had been as funny, IMO.
- deathsquadx, on 12/31/2007, -2/+10Wow, maybe if you took the time to pull your dick out of your hillbilly cousin's ***** you'd realize that The Daily Show makes fun of both sides...it's just the right/Republicans that do more ridiculous stuff. This allows them to get more coverage. We've also been lucky enough to have quite possibly the DUMBEST ***** PRESIDENT EVER which provides hours of comedy gold.
p.s. I don't think DIGG is the place to start your right wing media revolution - pateo, on 12/31/2007, -1/+9Oh, man. That'll be a disaster without any writers. I mean, I'm sure Stewart and Colbert can do some good stuff too but an entire show every night?
- FDDIcent, on 12/31/2007, -4/+12itunes?
- deathsquadx, on 12/31/2007, -1/+9"whatever it takes..."
...Like not having any writers? - wattznext, on 12/31/2007, -0/+7But while you are waking up late on NYD and enjoying a greasy, hangover beating tailor ham, egg, and cheese, he will already be back at work. See, time zones can be your friend too!
- Humptydank, on 12/31/2007, -0/+7It's not a matter of logic norman, it's economics. It's what people earn vs. when their employers want to pay vs. the risk of losing money.
You find royalty agreements with talent in many industries where there is a higher level of uncertainty in any individual product's success. It's a tool of the producer to lower production costs.
The reason you don't see auto workers on a GM assembly line receiving royalties is because GM doesn't need to offer them. The economics of their business are not subject to extremely competitive recruiting at the assembly level, and a specific model automobile is so highly market-tested that the economics are fairly stable.
Where you might see royalties, or an equivalent royalty-based bonus pool would be at a smaller hand-made auto company like Panoz. To attract designers away from the larger auto companies without having to pay huge salaries against uncertain success, they might offer a reasonable yearly salary with participation in the back-end sales.
To extend that to the writers current situation, imagine if you were an auto designer lured to Panoz by a salary of $100,000, half or less what you'd earn at GM, but also 0.1% of sales of each car you designed. You design two cars and they're both great successes. So successful, in fact, that Panoz has built a very big business selling aftermarket parts like headlights and spoilers that are your designs taken directly from your two cars.
Granted, you shouldn't get money for those parts under your current contract, it's not specified. But when contract renegotiation time rolls around, wouldn't you say that those aftermarket parts are your designs too, and that they should be subject to the participation agreement, or that Panoz should design parts for their aftermarket division from scratch, or pay you to do it separately? - enicholas, on 12/31/2007, -2/+9Does it hurt to be that bitter and stupid?
- inactive, on 12/31/2007, -0/+7Yeah, even while on strike, the writers are still getting paid in residuals, which camera operators and stage hands don't get.
- TeddySanFran, on 12/31/2007, -2/+9Does this mean that Jon Stewart will have Perv Musharaff and William The Bloody Kristol on as guests night after night?
- sinrtb, on 12/31/2007, -0/+6because colbert/stewart are on the side of the writers but comedy central is not budging.
- borninda818, on 12/31/2007, -1/+7$$
- Defuser, on 12/31/2007, -2/+8I swear, has there ever been a bigger collection of brainless sheep than Digg? Whatever the first moron in line says, the rest of you line up to support. Ever stop to think that just MAYBE the other people who had their Christmas (and possibly their marriages, careers, and lives) ruined by the pointless writer's strike deserve just a little bit of compassion? You know- the "little people" that weren't getting residuals or six-figure writing contracts, but who showed up every day anyway, and made shows like the Daily Show possible? What's really amusing here is that the Writers Guild are EXACTLY like the RIAA: a bunch of greedy ***** that want to be paid repeatedly, until the day they die, for a product that other people make possible. Imagine if the contractor that built your house and the architect that designed it demanded that you pay them residuals every time you opened the door. Then imagine that when you went to sell it, they showed up and said "woah, we built and designed this house, so it's not really yours. We deserve half the money from the sale". You'd think that was retarded, right? (Of course, being Diggers, maybe you wouldn't. Most of you don't seem to have any ability at all to form a rational thought.)
- doctorfungi, on 12/31/2007, -4/+9Bah I'm drunk. New Years Eve. Signed! (Don't know what I'm signing here...)
- laserdog, on 12/31/2007, -1/+6Better yet, cancel your cable subscription in protest.
Donate the money you save to give food to the writer's families.
Or just give some random people your email address and forget about it... - noahhoward, on 12/31/2007, -7/+12Amen, I can only imagine what would happen if I told my boss I needed to get royalties for the designs I make on his time.
- bjornski, on 12/31/2007, -0/+5Asking a reich-winger to absorb facts?
Ain't happening. - blaket, on 12/31/2007, -1/+6Actually at this point I care more about the multitude of workers who have been wrecked by this strike, the actual people who work on the show -- stage hands, camera operators, etc. -- than I do about the writers and the studios.
I'd gladly go without any new shows as long as it meant that those people had their jobs still and weren't being financially ruined by this. I agree that the writers should have a larger stake in what they create, but when it comes at the expense of ten times the number of workers that's where I start to waver. - GliTCH82, on 12/31/2007, -1/+6Ah, that Jonathan Leibowitz, he gets me every time.
- lukifer, on 12/31/2007, -2/+6Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
- korashime2001, on 12/31/2007, -1/+5How is it unfair that he negotiated with the writers?
- Humptydank, on 12/31/2007, -0/+4If Comedy Central wants a Daily Show without writers, then I think Jon Stewart should deliver it.
Just air a half-hour of C-Span, then every five minutes Stewart says, "Yeah. What's that about?!" - Nougat, on 12/31/2007, -0/+4I'm actually interested in seeing them back without writers. It's going to be some of the weirdest television ever.
- diggity_dank, on 12/31/2007, -0/+4Did you happen to actually read the petition? Read before to assume liberal hypocrisy.
- Gop3588, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3No, the petition is AGAINST having Stewart back,whoever started it doesn't want to have him cross the picket line.
- RobotBuddha, on 12/31/2007, -1/+4Yes, I do believe they wouldn't be next. They're not getting residuals from their work, internet or otherwise. Which makes the complaints by those writers getting at least some income during this all the more annoying.
- inactive, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3TV is dead. The writers have done themselves a disservice. When the strike is over, Im probably not going to watch anything anyway. Same thing happened to me with baseball in the 90s (if I recall)... I never went back.
- theblt, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3I'm a conservative and I think Colbert is hilarious. I even bought and highly recommend the audiobook version of "I Am America and So Can You" which is sarcastically and strongly against the conservative viewpoint. So why would I watch/listen to it? It's entertainment - if you don't like it, change the channel. And if you get your news from either Stewart or Colbert, you have some other issues to deal with.
- sindex, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3writing a 30 minute stand-up act and performing it is one thing. Writing 30 minutes of TV 5 days a week, 40+ weeks out of the year takes a team of people. It isn't that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are incapable of writing their own material; it's that human beings are incapable of keeping up with that schedule without a team of people working on it.
- TrevorBelmont, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3I think you've misunderstood everything that's going on here. You've got it all ass backwards.
- drewkinney, on 12/31/2007, -0/+3I worked on a TV show for 10 years and periodically there was the possibility for a strike work stoppage. Each time I worried about being able to keep my house and put food on the table. The entire crew of every show are/ or are about to be out of work.
Everyone needs to think beyond, "man the show will suck". We're talking peoples live at stake here.
I agree with the writers on their grievances about pay, from new sources of revenue for the studios. The studios do what they have always done- complain that they haven't figured out how to make money with new sources. This is the same argument that they pulled over DVD sales and rentals.
Do any of you realize that these guys paid their crews when their shows stopped production? By agreeing to return they ensure their crews remain available to work for the show. The primary reason this isn't happening to Letterman is his company owns his show. This allowed him to negotiate a deal with the writers.
As a former crew member, who doesn't receive residuals from media sales I say Support John Stewart and Stephen Colbert! Now get ready for their comedy to skewer the producers in their dealings with this work stoppage. -
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