On the Internet, there are no picket lines

(The writer of our main story on the World-Wide Web, Chris Gulker, elected to resign from the Newspaper Guild during November's San Francisco newspaper strike. But Gulker wasn't the only technophile in the Guild, as Correspondent George Powell, treasurer of the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild, points out.)

Strikes are no fun, but like war, they can sometimes speed up certain technological processes and make change happen faster than would be the case in the normal life of an organization.

In November, the Internet had real old-fashioned newspaper competition between The Gate -- the on-line versions of the Chronicle and Examiner -- and the Free Press, written by the striking San Francisco journalists.

Though Guild members printed thousands of copies of the Free Press, Examiner Associate Editor Bruce Koon and free-lance writer Marcelo Rodriguez were instrumental in taking the copy from writers and coding it in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) for use by browsers on the World-Wide Web.

Rodriguez, a past president of the National Writers Union, and Koon felt a strong obligation to get information out to potential readers who would miss the usual columnists and writers in the struck papers.

"I didn't think of the Internet Free Press as a tactic in the strike," said Rodriguez, "but as a way to provide information to people who weren't getting a newspaper."

The decision to go daily for the Internet version was made, naturally, at the M&M, a bar where many San Francisco newspaper people hang out. An Internet provider, CCNet in Walnut Creek, Calif., was selected as the home for the Free Press files.

The first electronic edition of the Free Press was available less than 48 hours after the strike started on Nov. 1. There were combined Saturday and Sunday editions, and the final Internet Free Press was posted Nov. 14, the day ratification of the new contract was completed.

The daily production routine for the paper consisted of reporters filing stories into the America Online mailbox for the Free Press, and those stories being coded in HTML by Koon on his Powerbook or Rodriguez, who was running a PC under OS/2.

Any graphics used in the printed Free Press were converted and downsized in Adobe Photoshop from TIFF or EPS to the GIF format.

After the first two editions, a script was created for automating HTML coding of stories. Consequently, the "press run" for the Internet edition consisted of running the script on the day's stories, then posting the coded edition.

The Free Press had more than 250,000 "hits," or accesses overall, according to Rodriguez. The busiest day was Nov. 9, he said, when 77,000 accesses were logged.

Although it wasn't an intended consequence of the strike, a large number of people with computers had access to competing newspapers -- and got a glimpse of one possible future for publishing as well.

-- George Powell

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.