Four days after participating in “Star Trek Day” on the Writers Guild of America’s picket lines at Paramount, the StarTrek.com production team received its walking papers from CBS Interactive.
No official link between those two events has been made; we cite them as they happened chronologically. However, we have noticed CBS pulling a little sleight of hand with this unhappy change.
On December 14th, the former production team posted this message on StarTrek.com’s News section:
Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team
Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately.
We don’t know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years.
If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com – we hope someone at CBS will read them.
Thank you for your loyal fandom over the years. It has been a pleasure to serve you.
When we contacted CBS for a comment about this change, we received a statement about the changes being planned within StarTrek.com by CBS Interactive. The text of the statement also appears on StarTrek.com at this link.
The URL from that link is the same URL that contained the farewell message from the production team, the message we reproduced earlier. That earlier post has been cached in Yahoo’s search engine, and we have kept a copy too.
CBS Interactive has full rights to do as it wishes with its site and its employees. The right to do something doesn’t always fully consider the wisdom of doing so.
It’s obvious from the earlier post the entire team had been fired on short notice. Was Strike Trek the catalyst for this change?
People tend to not burn bridges in Hollywood, so we’ll likely never know. Unless they post something in the comments below (hint hint).
