page_title: San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994
section_title: Two online newspapers
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 / Two online newspapers
caption_attribution_description: English: Members of CNU (Conference of Newspaper Unions) protest in front of San Francisco's City Hall on November 5, 1994 at Polk and McAllister Streets. The empty news racks of the two city papers reflect the result of the 4 day old strike which would last for 7 more days. Photograph by Nancy Wong
context_page_description: The San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 was a labor dispute called by the Newspaper Guild in November 1994. Employees of San Francisco's two major daily newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner walked off the job for eleven days.
context_section_description: At the beginning of the strike, The Examiner's Head of Development Chris Gulker re-launched his pilot web project called the Electric Examiner as The Gate, thus creating the official online version of San Francisco's two big newspapers. This news service remained "heavily dependent on wire-service stories" for lack of contributing journalists and editors.
  The striking journalists set up their own online newspaper, the San Francisco Free Press, and competed with The Gate as "the soul of the Examiner and the Chronicle." Led by the Examiner's Associate Editor Bruce Koon and former SF Weekly editor Marcelo Rodriguez, they received assistance from Cynsa Bonorris, who coded the html, and Dave Winer, who pitched in helping automate the production process. The team operated from a makeshift newsroom using their own hardware and a local ISP for rented server space.
  The Free Press scored a scoop during its first week, reporting that Senator Dianne Feinstein had been wrongly accused of hiring an undocumented worker in the early 1980s.
  During the strike both online newspapers were claiming a total of more than 100,000 readers a day, which was a fraction of the actual newspapers' estimated circulation of 600,000, but far beyond the 10,000 or so people in the Bay Area who had access to them.
caption: Union members protest in front of San Francisco's City Hall on November 5, 1994
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