Briefly In Business

Writers vote to approve deal with producers

An overwhelming majority of Writers Guild of America members voted Tuesday to formally adopt the terms of an agreement that ended the union’s 100-day strike, according to the writers guild.

More than 93% of the estimated 4,000 writers guild members in both Los Angeles and New York voted to accept the terms of the three-year deal they agreed in principle to with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that put an end to the strike on Feb. 13, the guild said.

Leaders of the writers guild praised the deal, including Patric M. Verrone, president of the union’s western branch, who said the agreement broke new ground for writers in the “digital age.”

The deal establishes writer jurisdiction for projects made for new media outlets, such as the Internet; provides residual payments for new media projects that are repeated online, including Internet downloads and movies and television shows that are streamed online; and establishes a new system for the union to calculate how much writers will receive from recurring new media projects.

The end of the strike signaled the return of work at media studios that have pressed their writers back into action as many shows plan to return where they left off before the strike brought production to a standstill.