Thread by @JoeKeohane

1. As a member of the @WGAEast and a former magazine guy, I see nauseating similarities between what happened to mags and the situation in Hollywood. Magazines took a profitable business, and, confronted with the growth of digital newcomers, started producing way more content...

2. ... most of it low-cost junk thrown together on the fly by underpaid or unpaid contribs—in a panicked online arms race driven by the naïve/lunatic belief that if they only hit a certain traffic threshold, a viable business plan would reveal itself. (It didn't.)

3. In the process, magazines (and many papers) trashed their brand equity, exhausted their workforces, bored/insulted their readers, and created a situation where the only people who could afford to write for them were people who don’t actually need to work. (That's bad.)

4. After a few years of this, the magazine business as we know it collapsed. And now Vice and Buzzfeed, the disruptors who helped set off this stampede to the bottom, are failing too. (I haven't even heard the name "HuffPost" in years, thank God.)

5. Same thing is happening now in Hollywood. Confronted with the growth of digital disruptors, studios panicked and started flooding the market with content—driven by the naïve/lunatic idea that as long as you’re growing subscriptions, a viable business plan would reveal itself.

6. In order to produce that much, they lost a lot of money, saturated the market, overwhelmed the viewers, and put writers on a path to a situation where the only ones who will be able to afford to write for them are the people who don’t actually need to work. (Also bad.)

7. And now we have Wall Street demanding these companies actually make money (because contrary to the customarily ruinous Silicon Valley mentality, you can't butter your parsnips with growth), and instead of new ideas, the studios have responded... with massive cuts.

8. With the writers strike, as with magazines, the studio argument against compensating writers fairly is that if they do, they won't be able to keep doing the thing they've been doing, which also happens to not even remotely work.

9. I loved magazines, and I was outrageously fortunate to be able to work at some great ones. I also love movies and TV. And I don't want to see the same stupid, needless fate befall art forms that have meant the world to me since I was a kid. But it will if this continues.