Hollywood Writers and Media Workers are Fighting the Same Fight

AI, lower wages, and less opportunities: the WGA strike sounds familiar.

 

Andie Ngeleka thought that TV writing would bring the stability she couldn’t find while working in digital media. For two years, she wrote as a contractor for Into, a queer outlet once owned by Grindr. During that time, Ngeleka experienced a dynamic many media workers know all too well: despite developing connections with editors and producing consistent content, she could never turn her gig into full-time, salaried employment. Eventually, the site pivoted to video and shuttered. 

Now working in TV, she’s once again navigating choppy waters. Ngeleka, who has worked as a writer’s personal assistant more than once, is again struggling to move up the ladder as fewer writers are being hired. She repeatedly finds herself in supporting staff positions, struggling to secure her next writing opportunity. “You’re more likely to sell a show than you are to get staffed sometimes, because the rooms are just getting smaller and smaller,” she told Study Hall.

Since she hasn’t earned enough writing credits yet to qualify, Ngeleka is not part of the Writer’s Guild of America. That hasn’t stopped her from showing support for the striking Hollywood writers, however. Ngeleka has been on the picket lines outside CBS Radford Studios and Netflix with her fellow writers since the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers refused to negotiate a fair contract with the writers’ union on May 1. She’s been out there both in solidarity, and because her desire to make a decent living in the industry is also at the heart of the striking writers’ fight for better opportunities and higher wages. 

With Wall Street investors and tech behemoths breathing down their neck, studios are turning TV and film writing — once a well-paying, sometimes lucrative career — into a gig economy for writers, while CEOs make millions a year. TV seasons are shorter, writing rooms are smaller, and mini rooms, which allow studios to hire writers for less pay, are the new norm. The residuals system — where writers once received royalty payments when shows with their screenwriting credits are picked up by cable networks — needs to be updated for the streaming age. On top of all that, the studios rejected the union’s proposal to regulate AI in the creative process. If you’ve been following digital media as of late, this may all seem eerily familiar.  

“The idea of being a staff writer at a magazine isn’t realistic anymore,” Ngeleka said. “Working on this most recent show that I did for Apple, I had the same conclusion about getting staffed [in TV].”  

The current labor stoppage is the WGA’s first strike since 2007, and the writers’ demands are largely focused on ensuring that they get their fair share from record streaming profits. 

Streaming platforms like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix (all tech companies) are competing for dominance, and have prioritized shorter seasons in favor of producing more content. In 2022, broadcast, cable, and streaming services aired a combined 599 original scripted TV series. As a result, writers are losing the job security that used to come with writing for network TV shows where 22-episode-seasons were the norm. This means that instead of having one job for the majority of the year, writers find themselves looking for work on multiple TV shows so they can pay the bills. Landing one job is hard enough, finding multiple is sometimes impossible. When the bubble bursts, writers may be most vulnerable to layoffs. 

“The problem facing digital media is similar to Hollywood, in that neither industry currently appears to be wholly viable,” Joe Keohane, a journalist who was developing a TV show based off his novel “The Lemon” prior to the strike, wrote via email. “When WGA members talk about the issues at play in the strike being ‘existential,’ they’re not just talking about writers. They’re talking about the whole business being broken.” 

David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. made $246 million in 2021, while Netflix’s co-CEOs (I guess this is a job title that doesn’t just exist on “Succession”) each raked in $50 million in 2022. For context: Zaslav’s nearly $250 million is what 10,000 writers are asking to be paid collectively, writer and comedian Adam Conover told CNN. Ultimately, the WGA’s demands for higher wages are a “sliver of a slice of the pie” from studios’ budgets and executives would still make a killing if they compensated writers fairly, said Drew McWeeny, a film critic and screenwriter. McWeeny worries that if Hollywood continues to devalue its writers, there will be fewer opportunities for them to find mentorship and learn the business. 

“There is no path in anymore,” he said.

In a landscape of diminishing wages and opportunities, marginalized writers are especially impacted. Kaitlin Fontana, a WGA, East council member who worked in music journalism for 10 years, said that despite studio executives “paying lip service towards the idea of making this a better town for people of color, queer people, and people from different socioeconomic backgrounds,” they are actually creating more barriers to entering the business. Fewer opportunities for marginalized writers — who get pushed out of the industry, as a result — also means only certain stories will be told. Fontana, who identifies as queer, said she only made $30,000 last year and is about to lose her health insurance. 

Having worked in media since she was 19, Fontana witnessed how the “brain rot hollows out these beautiful companies full of very smart, talented people,” and doesn’t want to see that “happen to TV and film.” Noting how the same corporate conglomerates own both news media and entertainment entities, Fontana stressed that media workers and Hollywood writers are “actually in the same fight.” In fact, as a council member for the WGAE, she sits “shoulder to shoulder” with council members employed in digital media.

Writing is sometimes considered a labor of love. So when a writer scores a high-profile screenwriting gig or a staff writer position at a dream publication, it can feel like a personal breakthrough, not just a career milestone, especially in industries that can be hard to break into. But writing is also work. 

“This is a dream job that I literally changed my whole life to do,” said Jamie Lynn Harris, a staff writer on CBS’s “East New York.” “But this is a job and so I need to be treated with a certain level of respect. I think writers need to remember that what they do is so valuable and so special.” 

The WGA writers strike, as well as recent actions across the digital media industry, are all happening within a broader moment for organized labor. Nationwide, workers across industries are taking collective action to win back their power.  

“The big lesson that we’re learning in America right now, for every business — whether it be Starbucks workers, whether it be us —  is that labor has to organize. It is the only protection we have,” McWeeny said. “Right now more than ever, I think every human-driven industry faces genuine threats from Wall Street and from technology.” 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

—Vaughn Sterling was (literally, this is not a joke) laid off from ATN on Sunday night.
—Razia Iqbal is leaving the BBC after three decades with the public broadcaster.
—Caitriona Perry is leaving RTÉ News as a presenter and joining BBC News.
—Shirley Halperin is Los Angeles Magazine’s new editor-in-chief. She is leaving her role as Variety’s executive editor of music.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—The top human resources executive at Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Inc Magazine and Fast Company, allegedly committed “financial fraud against the company,” a spokesperson told Semafor. Nirvani Sabess allegedly stole more than $429,000 from the publisher over a period of four years, diverting the pay of several former employees into her own bank account. Sabess also gave herself an extra $15,000 on her annual bonus.
—Illustrators are taking a stand in the fight against AI. In an open letter to the publishing industry, the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting demanded restricting the use of AI illustrations. The letter, signed by thousands of writers, editors, artists, and illustrators, argues that generative-image AI technology threatens the “interpretive and narrative confluence of art and text, of human writer and illustrator,” and, if left unchecked, it poses an existential threat to the entire field of journalism. “Illustrators like me want the same thing as the writers of WGAW — we want to stop these corporate AI generators from worming their way into our jobs, stripping us of our livelihoods, and stealing our art to feed their datasets and ultimately replace us,” artist Molly Crabapple tweeted.
—A wild “TK” appears at the WGA picket line in New York City.