Writers strike Follow

Striking members of the Writers Guild of America are launching a strike paper Tuesday — a sure sign that they are digging for a long haul in their battle with the major entertainment conglomerates for a share of revenues in new media. The four-page tabloid will be published Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and is intended to "boost morale on the picket lines," according to the publication’s city editor, Rafael Alvarez (pictured). The name might be still familiar to some readers in these parts, where Alvarez worked for 20 years at the Baltimore Sun in variety of reporting positions. Alvarez is now a producer/writer on the NBC cop drama, Life, which was just picked up for the full season — assuming the TV season ever resumes. Despite the editing title, Alvarez will be doing lots of reporting, he says — responsible for stories from the picket lines and half a dozen Hollywood studios. "I started off as a kid on the Sun city desk chasing cops and obits, and now here I am 30 years later, with a reporter’s notebook in my pocket interviewing picketing screenwriters who wrote cool stuff like Live and Let Die, The Big Valley, and Ironsides," says Alvarez. "I haven’t done daily reporting since I left the Sun in 2001, but you never forget it. It’s fun again." Alvarez says he learned how to be a city editor "by hiding from" his editors "through most of the 1980s." (He's kidding.) The paper will be called The Daily Verity. "It’s a play on Daily Variety, but, yes, it’s verity as in truth — truth, justice and the American way of life." (Photo courtesy of Alvarez)