“What are we doing this for?” he asked.
“Sir,” Chronicle political editor Susan Yoachum explained, “you’re going to be on the Internet.”
At first it looked like just another big-city newspaper strike. But before the San Francisco dispute ended with a tentative settlement over the weekend, it introduced a new weapon in publishing showdowns: the cyberstrike. For nearly two weeks, management and striking editorial staffers at the Chronicle and the Examiner took to the Internet to supplement erratically distributed print copies of their papers. Both the San Francisco Free Press, the strikers’ paper, and the managemere-produced The Gate were available free through the Word Wide Web. Newspapers across the country had already been experimenting with on-line incarnations. But J. T. Johnson, professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, says that the speed and the ease with which the rivals went online will accelerate those efforts. “This is going to light the fire of change,” he says.
That change will favor the technological elite. Thought eight unions–including janitors, pressmen and trackdrivers–were on strike, it took only one group of employees–reporters, editors and photographers–to debut the online Free Press just over 35 hours after the strike began. It was produced by a few editors hunched over their home PCs who had to tutor their less adept colleagues. “To file a story that you’re too technologically inept to read is the odd-est experience,” confesses Yoachum, one of the “unwired.” But she happily took to the medium after she and a colleague broke the story that U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein had hired an illegal immigrant. The team got calls from all over the country asking for a copy of a story that never appeared in print. “It was a cyberscoop,” says Yoachum.
The Gate was scoopless. Both the Examiner’s and the Chronicle’s versions were heavily dependent on wire-service stories. But The Gate offered some of the features that newspaper-starved San Franciscans craved, like classified ads and movie listings. And it aimed for reader-friendliness,too. Chris Gulker, manager of development at the Examiner, says he e-mailed an early copy of a horoscope to a desperate reader.
In the wake of the strike, no one is predicting that readers are going to abandon print horoscopes. Even in technologically hip San Francisco, only an estimated 10,000 readers have the capability to access the online papers. But that number is growing, and Gulker says a new and improved Gate will be around to service them. The Gate even hopes to make money by charging for customized services. It will have an easier time attracting customers now that the Free Press’s popular writers are back in the fold.
