Los Angles Mayor Karen Bass said Sunday after the tentative deal was announced, "Now, we must focus on getting the entertainment industry, and all the small businesses that depend on it, back on their feet and stronger than ever before.”

The strikes have also affected numerous businesses that rely on the entertainment industry.

The WGA said in a statement at that time that the agreement was “made possible by the enduring solidarity of WGA members and extraordinary support of our union siblings who joined us on the picket lines for over 146 days.”

The members of that union, officially the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, also are raising issues about compensation in an era of streaming and about safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence.

was a major issue when writers hit the picket line more than four months ago.

It would also raise the rates of health care and pension contributions,

“I’m not overjoyed, I’m determined,” Aboud said. “But I feel like there are a lot of pieces to pick up.”

the experience of writers being able to stay writers benefits the companies,

you get a job as a writer, you’re going to make enough or hopefully make enough to survive and also be able to hopefully ride out the downtime

David A. Goodman, co-chair of the WGA negotiating committee, called the new contract “transformative,” comparing it to a deal struck in 1960, when the guild won pension and heath care benefits.

protections around the use of AI — although the guild was not able to lock in a guarantee that studios wouldn’t use original content to “teach” AI programs.

Among the important wins in the three-year contract:

“I think it’s a really great day because the writers believed in each other, and supported each other, and helped each other, and got something that’s good for all writers,” Kaplan added.

Jessica Goldstein, an executive producer on “That ’90s Show,

The length of the strike was grueling, but the contract that resulted was uniformly hailed as a big win that answers the demands of the streaming era while ensuring fair compensation for all.

A number of celebrities—particularly talk show hosts who have fewer WGA writers on their staff—have come under fire in recent weeks for attempting to bring back their shows.

The unions have argued the streaming era has diminished earning opportunities for writers and actors, as re-runs on broadcast television would earn them residual payments, but reruns on streaming platforms do not, while shorter and less frequent seasons on streaming compared to traditional network TV have also eaten into earning potential. Writers are also concerned that the growth in AI could mean their jobs get replaced by the burgeoning technology

WGA West President Meredith Stiehm told Deadline: “This strike was way too long, because the companies took so long to get serious

the guild thanked its 11,500-strong membership for generating “leverage” with their participation in the work stoppage.

Writers were pushing for streaming residuals and protections against the threat of AI in the film industry

A prolonged production shutdown could hurt the workers that help support productions, such as drivers, dry cleaners, caterers, carpenters and lumber yard workers. In the 2007 strike, which lasted 100 days, the Los Angeles economy took an estimated $2.1 billion hit.

The fallout has been significant. Disney is in the midst of laying off 7,000 workers. Warner Bros. Discovery cut thousands of jobs and shelved titles last year as they confronted a huge debt load. Many other studios are adopting similar cost-saving measures.

They are also fighting what they describe as “abuses” of so-called minirooms.

But compensation is the most crucial issue to them.

guardrails about artificial intelligence.

Historically, yes. There have been decades-long tensions between writers and the studios, with writers often feeling like second-class citizens

Television production has grown rapidly over the past decade, as media companies have invested billions into streaming services. But the writers have said that their compensation has stagnated.

Original writers on older cable and network TV projects that have subsequently aired on streamers will remain uncompensated by the newer platforms.

Under the contract, AI can't be used to write or rewrite literary material. However, a writer can choose to use the services of AI for projects, provided consent has been given by companies and the individual follows certain policies. A writer cannot be compelled to use AI software.

the new agreement requires them to share only the cumulative number of hours streamed, as opposed to information on how many people have watched a show or film in total—data that Netflix has already been sharing since 2020 via its weekly Top 10 lists.

The new agreement will see residuals paid out on projects that "are viewed by 20% or more of the service's domestic subscribers in the first 90 days of release, or in the first 90 days in any subsequent exhibition year."The WGA's access to information from these platforms will be limited to confidential reports of "the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series)."

Before the agreement, screenwriters on such projects as reboots, remakes and existing intellectual property (for example, films based on books, comics, or consumer products like Barbie) were not entitled to such payment. This led to concerns that studios would pursue more IP-driven projects and fewer original ideas in a bid to cut costs.

For writers who aren't yet viewed as prolific showrunners, this exception could likely become a bone of contention in the coming years, as these auteur showrunners will no longer be required to take on a writing staff or run a writers' room.

Shows that have a run of seven to 12 episodes per season are required to hire five writers, while series that have a run of 13 episodes or more must take on six writers. Of these totals, three writer-producers are required to be onboard.

those who write for Netflix will see the streaming platform's three-year foreign residuals rise from the current structure of $18,684 for a one-hour episode to $32,830

Before streaming became dominant, this often meant payment for cable reruns, syndication, home video releases, and streaming licensing windows, with checks coming anytime an episode of TV you participated in was repeated on cable. For projects that are produced for the streaming platforms, residual payments generally start after a show's 90-day window on the service.

Residuals are payments negotiated by the unions that key members of a production—such as actors, writers, and directors—are paid by studios to cover any time a TV show or movie is watched beyond its initial compensation window, with payments decreasing every year

A summary of the agreement published on the WGA's website

representatives of AMPTP said that the trade association "presented a deal that offered historic pay and residual increases, substantially higher caps on pension and health contributions, audition protections, shortened series option periods, and a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members."

The studios' refusal to rule out artificial intelligence one day replacing human workers escalated the tensions.

The AMPTP comprises the major studios: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Warner Bros., NBC Universal, Sony, and Paramount.

The industrial action saw a number of shows postponed or canceled as writers were no longer permitted to contribute to scripts on projects either in development or in production.

and they won big

October had long been seen as kind of a last-ditch moment for an agreement to be reached without catastrophic meltdowns in the industry. That said, many workers inside and outside Hollywood have incurred immense financial losses during the strike, and studios like Warner Bros. Discovery, which initially saw a bump to their bottom line, have projected lower earnings for 2023, by $300 million to $500 million.

the WGA’s agreement with the AMPTP historically sets the template for Hollywood’s other trade unions.

This timeline is similar to the events ending the last strike, which happened 15 years ago.

the WGA contract is likely to influence the terms of SAG-AFTRA’s ongoing negotiations

“the WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law” — a major issue given many authors’ recent discovery that their work is being used to train AI owned by Meta and other companies.

The MOA includes increases to minimum wage and compensation, increased pension and health fund rates, improvements to terms for length of employment and size of writing teams (which had been shrinking drastically in recent years), and better residuals (which are like royalties), including foreign streaming residuals.

President Joe Biden, who is set to join striking auto workers on their picket line on Tuesday, issued a statement applauding the writers’ tentative deal. “There simply is no substitute for employers and employees coming together to negotiate in good faith toward an agreement that makes a business stronger and secures the pay, benefits, and dignity that workers deserve,” he said.

The strike officially ended in the wee hours of Wednesday, September 27, after 148 days,

What most observers agree on, though, is that this was just the first of many AI labor disputes.

Robert D. Atkinson, president of the tech policy think tank Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, said limiting AI is unproductive.“If we ban the use of tools to make organizations more productive, we are consigning ourselves to stagnation,” Atkinson write on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Some skeptics doubt whether the writers made significant headway on AI. Media mogul Barry Diller, chairman of the digital media company IAC, believes not enough was done.

David Gunkel, a professor of media studies at Northern Illinois University

Last week, 17 authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging the “systematic theft on a massive scale” of their copyrighted books.

they hashed out terms while noting that the outlook is certain to change. Under the draft contract, “the parties acknowledge that the legal landscape around the use of (generative AI) is uncertain and rapidly developing.”

Language over AI became a sticking point in the writers’ negotiations, which dragged on last week in part due to the challenges of bargaining on such a fast-evolving technology.

Tom Davenport, a professor of information technology at Babson College and author of “ All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence.” “It pretty much insures that if you’re going to use AI, it’s going to be humans working alongside AI.

The strike was also about streaming-era economics, writers room minimums and residuals — not exactly compelling picket-sign fodder. But the threat of AI vividly cast the writers’ plight as a human-versus-machine clash, with widespread implications for other industries facing a radically new kind of automation.

During the nearly five-month walkout, no issue resonated more than the use of AI in script writing.

screenwriters secured significant guardrails

the real narrative of this strike is that 11,000 WGA members, most of whom you’ve never heard of, and 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, many of whom you’ve never heard of, had the power together to bring change.”

The studios pushed back. “Guys, we’re on the 5-yard line, don’t come back here and say it’s a new kickoff,” said Zaslav, according to a person in the room.

“The longer the strike goes on, what I’m sensing is firmer resolve and more anger. We aren’t only striking for ourselves — we’re striking for the writers who come after us.”

Underscoring the lack of trust between the two sides, the studios immediately released a summary of their offer publicly. The CEOs believed the public release helped put pressure on WGA leadership.

the writers left angry, saying they’d been subjected to a “lecture” about the strength of the studios’ offer. The studios only wanted them to “cave,” they said in a message to members.

according to people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to discuss it.

Complicating matters was the more diverse makeup of the alliance, which now included tech giants Amazon, Apple and Netflix, which had long resisted the idea of sharing streaming data — a chief concern for writers.

The strike did provide a short-term financial benefit for the companies. Paramount Global, Disney, Amazon Studios and others saved hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have been spent making and marketing shows. For some of the traditional companies, the savings boosted their stretched balance sheets, which they use to impress Wall Street, in an otherwise challenging year.

While the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the writers and several members popped up on the picket lines, Mayor Karen Bass studiously avoided entering the fray. There was speculation during the summer that the coalition-building politician might attempt to broker peace in Hollywood, but such a mediator role did not come to pass.

The presence of SAG-AFTRA members on picket lines reenergized the writers’ cause.

she blasted what she regarded as the greed of the studios and streamers.

In an interview with CNBC on the day the actors’ strike began, Disney’s Iger called strikers’ demands ill-timed and “not realistic.” To many, Iger’s argument was undermined by the fact that he was speaking from Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, informally known as “summer camp for billionaires.” Mountain meadowlarks chirped in the background.

Days after the Deadline article was published, the writers got thousands of new allies on picket lines. On July 13, SAG-AFTRA announced its own strike against the AMPTP, ratcheting up tensions in an industry that had not seen a joint strike by actors and writers since 1960.

“The most amazing thing about that quote was that somebody said it out loud,” Brian T. Arnold, a WGA strike captain at Paramount Pictures, said this week. “It laid out the way the AMPTP feels about artists and feels about their writers.

An AMPTP spokesperson said the anonymous person was “not speaking on behalf” of the alliance or its members.

That support was vividly on display in late May when Zaslav was met with a chorus of boos from students when he received an honorary degree and delivered the commencement address at Boston University.

the guild also moved aggressively

the battle played out as much on social media as it did on the picket lines, with writers portraying executives as callous, overpaid fat cats unconcerned about the workers they profited from. On picket lines, writers hoisted signs bearing easy-to-grasp messages such as “The CEOs Have Yachts, Writers Have Mortgages” and “We Just Want 2% From the 1%.”

Cal State Northridge associate professor of entertainment media management Todd Holmes estimates that the dual strikes have cost California’s economy about $5 billion.

the stage was set

Media companies have cut nearly 20,000 jobs in the last 18 months — about a third of those at Disney.

We fought in their streaming wars

The median weekly pay for writer-producers has declined by 23% over the last decade, according to the WGA’s figures.

599 scripted original series ran on linear channels and streaming services

years of mounting frustration over the industry’s shift toward a streaming-centered business model suddenly exploded into public view.

WGA West President Meredith Stiehm: “We won.”

With the new three-year agreement, the WGA gained much of what it had demanded back in April, including higher pay, minimum staffing requirements in writers’ rooms, bonuses for successful streaming shows and protections against the threat of screenwriters being replaced by artificial intelligence. The studios agreed to guarantee second-step payments to film screenwriters so they don’t have to spend months and months doing rewrites without a check.

“It took the AMPTP, and eventually the CEOs, 102 days to even understand that the game they had played in 2007 was not going to happen this time,” Keyser said this week in an interview.

Fifteen years ago, solidarity between the industry’s unions — and among writers themselves — had quickly frayed as the economic toll of the labor action began to mount.

a perfect storm of trends — deep anxieties over new technology, a nationwide surge in pro-labor activism, the messaging power of social media and historic solidarity among entertainment industry workers — collided with tactical miscalculations by studio chiefs to bring Hollywood to its knees.

“It shouldn’t have taken this long,” said entertainment lawyer Robert Schwartz, who was not involved in the deal.

On Wednesday, the strike ended after 148 days, making it one of the industry’s longest.

In an industry founded on creative collaboration, how did the two sides end up so deeply distrustful of one another that the business was brought to a grinding halt, causing billions of dollars in economic pain not only in Hollywood but for the Los Angeles economy as a whole?

Iger promised to spend as long as it would take to get a deal done, according to people close to the process who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Chris Keyser, the WGA Negotiating Committee’s co-chairman

Writers Guild of America against the major media companies

compared with 48% in urban schools.

Democratic teachers are more likely than Republican teachers to say this (73% vs. 66%)

About four-in-ten teachers (39%) say their school has done a fair or poor job providing them with the training and resources they need to deal with a potential active shooter.

survey methodology.

we surveyed 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023. The teachers are members of RAND’s American Teacher Panel, a nationally representative panel of public school K-12 teachers recruited through MDR Education.

crisis

“The equity stakes are monumental,” said Kim Cook, the chief executive of the National College Attainment Network. “The later those letters come, the more the conversation shifts from where to go to if to go.”

There are growing concerns that the FAFSA problems will disproportionately affect traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation and low-income students.

James Kvaal, the under secretary at the Education Department.

at the request of Republicans, who say it took a back seat to other priorities, like President Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness programs.

Andrea, 17

pernicious flaw

“It’s agonizing,” said Andrea, 17, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her parents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and are undocumented. “It’s deeper than a form. It’s our futures.”

Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver Collegiate High School in Colorado, will be the first person in her family to attend college.

The government needs the FAFSA information to calculate how much federal aid students should receive. The schools, in turn, need that number to make their own calculations about how much a student should expect to pay at that particular college or university, after tallying up tuition and any extra scholarships.

critical function

Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out of the form, or hung up on after holding for 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer

according to recordings of two back-to-back meetings

A Biden administration official, who asked for anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department had begun sending out “small batches” of data over the weekend.

“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails at this point,” said Justin Draeger, the chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Many schools are pushing back their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to figure out their finances, throwing college budgets and wait lists into chaos.

Richard Cordray,

A series of blunders by the department — from a haphazard rollout to technical meltdowns — have left students and schools in limbo and plunged the most critical stage of the college admissions season into disarray.

bureaucratic mess

millions of families and thousands of schools rely on

exasperated staff member

fateful

Karen Chavez, the assistant principal of college and career at a high school in Denver, and her student Andrea.

The Education Department

Blunders That Plunged the College Admission Season Into Disarray

Inside

the consequences of the FAFSA delays could be on par with the devastation that historically Black colleges and universities experienced in 2011, when the government made it harder for parents to obtain loans to help pay for their children’s educations.

as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had reached out for extra support

Student advocates fear many of them will simply give up, skipping college or relying on expensive loans to pay for it.

Even as the department has tried to project optimism about its progress, officials privately harbored doubts.

senior officials at the White House and the Education Department have cited unreasonably short timelines, contractors who blew past deadlines and insufficient funding.Credit...

There were obvious misses, such as a lack of robust user testing needed to catch what would turn out to be dozens of major technical problems. And the Education Department realized only in November that it had not adjusted a critical income formula, which would have denied more than $1 billion in aid to students.

it’s been a top priority for us at the very highest levels of the department going back a year and a half now

The company, General Dynamics Information Technology, had been involved in HealthCare.gov — an Obama-era online insurance marketplace that had a notoriously rough rollout in 2013.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

officials acknowledged that other important assignments, such as restarting federal loan repayments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, used up vital resources.

“This is a lot of the Dreamers, new immigrants and the kind of people who, if they can just get a hand up in the higher education process can make their way in this country,” Mr. Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”

the first sign of hope that college is within reach.

The goal of the revamped FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously bewildering form by whittling it down from more than 100 questions to fewer than 40 and making it more accessible to lower-income students.

The department is working with 5.7 million applications that are in so far, but more than 10 million additional ones are expected to roll in as students make their way through the process, which is still not functioning without delays.

It was another setback in the botched rollout

more than 200 of the department’s employees, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read through each of the emails one by one and extract crucial identifying information required for financial aid. The students’ futures depended on it.