The Writers Guild of America, both West and East chapters, are encouraging its members to ratify a tentative three-year agreement. According to NPR.org, “The proposal offers writers a share of digital media revenue, including compensation for television shows and movies delivered over the Internet.”

”When they get paid, we get paid,” Patric Verrone, president of WGA’s west chapter, said at the press conference in Los Angeles yesterday. ”Our stated goal was always to get a share of the future and we have that in this agreement.” [source]

WGA leaders are asking members to sign the agreement over the next 10 to 12 days, however, in the meantime, a vote will take place over the next 48 hours to decide whether or not the writers will return to work. If the vote passes, writers could return to work by Wednesday, Feb. 13th. The strike has lasted for over three months and has halted production on many movies and television shows and put 50,000 entertainment industry employees out of work.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announced, though reluctantly, that they will return to work on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Jan. 7th, with our without their writers. This announcement comes on the tail of Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel saying that they would go back to work in January.

The writer’s strike has had a big affect on many television programs, but the hardest hit were the late-night talk shows that rely on scripts daily. Stewart and Colbert have been in reruns since the strike began in early November. Though they aren’t happy about their decision, America’s favorite fake news anchors still managed to find the humor in the situation, saying in a statement, “We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.”

David Letterman also hopes to return to work in January; however, he and his World Wide Pants production company have been holding separate talks with writers in hopes of getting them back for their return to regular programming.

As a writer (or some perversion thereof), I’m still siding with the writers on this one. That being said, I just wish they’d get back to work already. If they stay on the picket lines, eventually I’m going to have to go out and get a life, and I know for a fact that shit is expensive. Heroes had its finale on Monday, The Office has been MIA. And new seasons of Lost and 24 may never see the light of day. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Jenna Fischer, Pam from The Office posted a blog on her MySpace page (we’re buddies, you know…I’m a stalker) that the writers and the studios were going to attempt overcome their differences and sit down at the negotiating table one more time. As it turns out, those talks have gone sour.

According to this article from the New York Times:

Those discussions continued through Friday with no discernible breakthrough in a strike that has passed the month-old point. By late afternoon, the sides had not closed a wide gap between competing proposals covering compensation for advertiser-supported programming shown free on the Internet. They also appeared to be at a standoff over guild demands for jursidiction over writers for reality television shows, which currently are largely outside of the guilds’ reach. Meanwhile, other key issues — including compensation for movies and shows sold via the Internet — had yet to be confronted.

In a letter to members, the presidents of the two writers guilds on Friday morning lashed out at the producers for holding back proposals and challenged them to negotiate with them “day and night, through the Christmas and New Years holidays” to end the strike. Producers representatives shot back with a broadside against the writers’ statement and tactics, accusing them of spending more time during the negotiating sessions talking among themselves than to their bargaining counterparts. The barbed exchanges did little to tamp down expectations of an imminent breakdown in the talks.

It’s over a month now, and things seem to be getting pretty nasty (the major point of contention being that writers are looking for greater residuals from DVD sales and reruns shown on the Internet, the latter of which they don’t get a penny from).

The AMPTP, which represents the networks and studios, however, was quick to shoot back [source]:

However, the AMPTP countered in its own statement that it did present a proposal, which it calls the “New Economic Partnership,” which would boost the average working writer’s salary to more than $230,000 a year.

The AMPTP also disputed the WGA’s claim that it has been at the bargaining table every day, ready to negotiate. “The WGA’s organizers sought a four-day break, and when they returned sessions that were supposed to begin at 10:00 am often did not start until after lunchtime. When they are at the negotiating site, WGA organizers typically spend as much time speaking among themselves as they do at the negotiating table.”

Further, said the AMPTP, writers refused “repeated requests” by producers to begin contract talks in the spring of 2007. “Had negotiations begun when the producers wanted them to start, perhaps the industry would not now be in the midst of this strike.”

All this means is I’m never going to find out how Jack and Kate got off the island and why they’re so sore at each other in the future.