The New York Times has a profile of WGA President Patric Verrone and David Young, the Guild's Executive Director. For some reason, the author of the piece does not seem to be aware of Mr. Young's title.
For the record, I think Patric Verrone, David Young and the other organizers have done a magnificent job of running the negotiation. I don't think they've made any significant mistakes. What I do think is that the AMPTP was just determined to try and get the WGA to accept a rotten deal and, when they couldn't make that happen, they shoved us aside and went to negotiate with the DGA.
There's an unfortunate tendency in Hollywood — and it's in full flower in the Writers Guild — that when things don't turn out the way we like, people leap to say, "You should have handled things differently." But in this case, I haven't heard anyone suggest anything that the Guild could have done to prevent this strike and the collapse of negotiations. (Well, I suppose we could have just taken a terrible deal…but then we'd have been stuck with a terrible deal and, three years from now, they'd have tried to force an even worse one on us and we'd have had an even worse strike then. When anyone does one of those summaries of how much the WGA gained and lost from this strike, they need to factor in the immutable fact that in show business, taking one poor deal always leads to another poor, usually worse deal.)
That said, I'm troubled by some issues relating to the Jay Leno situation. I've heard a lot about it but I don't think I've heard all sides so I'm reserving final judgment and for now, I'm just being troubled.
Finally, as an aside: The article quotes a number of people, including one Dennis Palumbo, described as a "screenwriter-turned-psychologist." When Mr. Palumbo toiled in the first of those professions, his partner was the author of this weblog and yes, this is quite unusual. All my other collaborators have gotten into gynecology.