On Tuesday, Fairfax announced 550 job cuts across their editorial staff. On Wednesday, the first to go was The Age's editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan. And now, on Thursday, Fairfax staff are on strike until Monday!

Here's the word we were just sent via the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance's handy SMS service, in two parts:

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Happy news emerged this morning from the deep, dank reaches of the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers headquarters, where it was announced the major studios have come to last-minute terms with AFTRA on a new three-year contract. Conveniently or not, the report comes a few hours before AFTRA's former negotiating partners in the Screen Actors Guild were set to resume their own talks with the majors. And with AFTRA reportedly agreeing to conditions on new-media residuals similar to those accepted by the DGA and WGA during the latter union's strike, SAG has until June 30 to determine if the terms are good enough for itself — or detonate! The! Industry! with another labour stoppage.

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· Paramount breaks the hearts of the millions of Trekkies who thought they'd be spending Christmas at the multiplex with Kirk, Spock and Uhura, delaying their J.J. Abrams directed Star Trek from this December 25 until May 8, 2009 in hopes that they can wring more money from the franchise during the summer blockbuster season. Also, DreamWorks is moving Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder from this July 11 to August 15, a change that Stiller's fans will endure without complaint. [Variety]
· We knew that Tom Cruise parody video was going to put some sizzle back into his career: Jerry O'Connell joins the cast of indie romantic comedy Baby on Board, which will also includes Heather Graham, John Corbett and Ian Ziering. [THR]

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Yesterday, Variety reported that several Big Name Actors were about to kick off a public campaign to shame convince SAG's leadership and the studios to pick up a phone and arrange the kind of pleasant little rap session with moguls like News Corps' Peter Chernin, Disney's Bob Iger and CBS's Les "Negotiations Are Fun! Let's Do One Every Week at My Place! I'll Even Spring for the Bagels!" Moonves that helped to end the writers strike, hoping that getting a jump on things before their Guild's contract expires at the end of June might help to avoid another one of those mildly inconvenient, 100-day shutdowns of the industry that seem wildly passé at this point. The first of these exhortations are appearing in the trades today, with the initial installment authored by George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, a line-up so laden with Oscar hardware that Hollywood has no choice but to take notice of their plea.

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· 24 co-creator/primetime-torture advocate Joel Surnow is leaving the series to follow his muse, having previously ceded day-to-day control of the show to fellow executive producer Howard Gordon. Surnow explains his decision to officially pass on Jack Bauer's interrogation-speeding belt-sander to his colleagues: "I've done seven years, almost eight years at the same place with the same great group of people. During the strike I started thinking about different things I'd like to do independently, and decided it was time to see if there were other opportunities I wanted to pursue." [Variety]
· Hoping to pressure SAG leaders into opening negotiations with the studios long before the June 30th expiration of their contract, "several top stars" may launch a public campaign in hopes of preempting a second industry-crippling work stoppage, possibly in the form of a series of "Don't Be Fucking Crazy. No One Wants Another Strike For At Least Three Years" ads in the trades featuring actors like George Clooney, Ben Affleck and Teri Hatcher hugging moguls such as Peter Chernin and Les Moonves. [Variety]

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The strike is over! Everyone's back to work! As expected, the WGA voted overwhelmingly to dance off the pickets lines and back to their sitcom writers rooms, deadline-rushed screenplays begging for punch-up, and blank Final Draft screens, with 92.5% of its membership agreeing to usher in a new, internet-enabled era of peace, love and shared prosperity that will last between four months and three years, when an ugly battle over a yet-discovered content-delivery platform (we're thinking gamma rays will be involved!) once again shakes the industry to its very foundation. Variety solicits the post-strike reflections of dangerously charismatic CBS despot Les Moonves, one of the moguls credited with hammering out the deal with the Guild:

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Today's LAT picks the strike-weary brains of four TV showrunners who are returning to work after three weeks of agonizing about the fates of their series, storylines they were forced to abandon, and early-draft scripts they may soon need to rush into production, hoping to illustrate the back-to-work chaos facing a town scrambling to pick up where it left off in early November. My Name is Earl's Greg Garcia, for example, is publicly promising that anyone who fritters away their precious time with unproductive chatter about which agency's picket line snacks were the most delicious (the debate, of course, begins and ends with CAA's baby-filled scones) risks an immediate shitcanning. ("[T]hat's all I've heard about for the last three months. And now it's over. I'm not going to sit and listen to them talk about it now. If you say the word 'strike' and you're not talking about bowling, you're fired.") Meanwhile, Lost's Damon Lindelof frets that his staff's been laid off for so long that they may have lost their already seemingly tenuous grasp on what the hell is going on with their magical, polar-bear-and-smoke-monster-infested island:

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Moving decisively into the Post-Strike Era that began with today's Return of The Showrunners Parade on Hollywood Blvd., ABC has already picked up nine--nine!--of its series for next season, giving Desperate Housewives, Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Brothers & Sisters and Ugly Betty full orders, while giving 13 episode each to newer shows Private Practice, Pushing Daisies, Samantha Who? and Dirty Sexy Money. Curiously absent from this list: Cavemen, an indication that the network's groundbreaking sitcomfercial experiment may have finally come to an end. [THR]

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· Network executives are trying to make sense of the brave, new, post-strike world they suddenly find themselves in, either taking this unprecedented opportunity to blow up their development system, or shrugging it off as a "blip" and going back to the old, comfortable ways of doing business (i.e., throwing a bunch of money at talent and pilots). Also, tough decisions need to be made about which series should be rushed back into production to finish up this abbreviated season, which should be put off until the fall, and which should be put out of their misery after losing their momentum. [Variety]
· Unsurprisingly, utterly fearless NBC perfect storm Ben Silverman (motto: "Let's do stuff!") is seizing the chance to shake things up inside the Peacock Family by shuffling around some executives and eliminating its largely vestigial current series department. [THR]

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With word arriving over the weekend that Saturday night's WGA Scribeapalooza II: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off event at the Shrine Auditorium sent TV showrunners back to work today and will return everyone else to their jobs on Wednesday pending the outcome of a strike-ending vote to be counted tomorrow night, Hollywood can safely upgrade its feelings of Cautious Optimism to full-blown This Waking Three-Month Nightmare Is Finally Over Euphoria.

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