| San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 | |||
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| Date | November 1--12, 1994 | ||
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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.
San Francisco's two major daily newspapers were longtime rivals that had been working under a joint operating agreement since 1965. [1] Employees had been working without a contract for the past year.
Wages were one major issue leading to the strike: while the unions demanded a 3.5 percent annual raise, management offered only a 2.46 percent annual raise over four years. Another point of contention was management's plan to cut the jobs of more than 150 teamster drivers over several years. [2]
Starting on November 1, 1994, some 2,600 reporters, editors, drivers, press operators and paper handlers of the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner walked off the job.
The strike turned violent. Bricks were thrown through paper carriers' windshields as they drove from the newspaper distribution center, and one non-union driver was hit on the head with a lead pipe, suffering a fractured skull. One teamster driver was killed by electricity when scaling a power pole. [3]
At the beginning of the strike, The Examiner's Head of Development Chris Gulker re-launched his pilot web project called the Electric Examiner [4] as The Gate, [5] thus creating the official online version of San Francisco's two big newspapers. This news service remained "heavily dependent on wire-service stories" [6] for lack of contributing journalists and editors.
The striking journalists set up their own online newspaper, the San Francisco Free Press, [7] and competed with The Gate as "the soul of the Examiner and the Chronicle." [8] Led by the Examiner's Associate Editor Bruce Koon and former SF Weekly editor Marcelo Rodriguez, [9] they received assistance from Cynsa Bonorris, who coded the html, and Dave Winer, who pitched in helping automate the production process. [10] The team operated from a makeshift newsroom using their own hardware and a local ISP for rented server space. [11]
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. [12]
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. [12]
On November 12, 1994, after eight straight days of negotiations mediated by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, the newspaper strike came to an end as management and a conference of eight unions announced a tentative agreement. [13]
The two competing electronic newspapers published during the strike have been hailed as "a milestone for online news," [11] especially since the "speed and relative ease with which both groups published electronic newspapers was a clear demonstration of the power of computers and digital networks for distributing information to a potential audience of millions of computer users worldwide." [5] The strike "put the web on the radar screens of news organizations" [11] and triggered an "exodus" [14] of Examiner staff to the web. Among them was David Talbot, who founded Salon.com after the Guild's online newspaper convinced him of the "potential of the new medium." [15]
Hearst Communications, Inc. is an American multinational mass media and business information conglomerate based in Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan in New York City.
The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) is a labor union in the United States and Canada. Formed in 1903 by the merger of the Team Drivers International Union and the Teamsters National Union, the union now represents a diverse membership of blue- and white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors, totalling about 1.3 million members in 2015. The union was formerly called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America.
James Phillip Hoffa, also known as James Hoffa Jr., is an American labor leader and attorney who was the tenth General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is the son of Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was first elected in 1998, and re-elected in 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016 to five-year terms. In 2018, Hoffa was elected chair of the Road Transport Section of the International Transport Workers' Federation at its quadrennial Congress in Singapore. Hoffa is the second-longest serving General President of the Teamsters Union, after Dan Tobin, who served from 1907 to 1952. Hoffa's final term as General President ended in 2022.
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The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was a major Los Angeles daily newspaper, published in the afternoon from Monday to Friday and in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. It was part of the Hearst syndicate. It was formed when the afternoon Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner, both of which were published there since the turn of the 20th century, merged in 1962.
Black Press Group Ltd. (BPG) is a Canadian commercial printer and newspaper publisher founded in 1975 by David Holmes Black, who has no relation to Canadian-born media mogul Conrad Black. Based in Surrey, British Columbia, it was previously owned by the publisher of Toronto Star and Black (80.65%).
SF Weekly is an online music publication and formerly alternative weekly newspaper founded in the 1970s in San Francisco, California. It was distributed every Thursday, and was published by the San Francisco Print Media Company. The paper has won national journalism awards, and sponsored the SF Weekly Music Awards.
Metro is a free weekly newspaper published by the San Jose, California, based Metro Newspapers. Also known as Metro Silicon Valley, as well as Metroactive online, the paper serves the greater Silicon Valley area. In addition to print form, Metro can be downloaded in PDF format for free from the publisher's website. Metro also keeps tabs on local politics and the "chattering" class of San Jose through its weekly column, The Fly.
Benjamin Fong-Torres is an American rock journalist best known for his association with Rolling Stone magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Berkeley Daily Planet was a free weekly newspaper published in Berkeley, California, which continues today as an internet-based news publication.
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The Los Angeles Examiner was a newspaper founded in 1903 by William Randolph Hearst in Los Angeles. The afternoon Los Angeles Herald-Express and the morning Los Angeles Examiner, both of which had been publishing in the city since the turn of the 20th century, merged in 1962. For a few years after this merger, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner claimed the largest afternoon-newspaper circulation in the country, publishing its last edition on November 2, 1989.
MinnPost is a nonprofit online newspaper in Minneapolis, founded in 2007, with a focus on Minnesota news.
Examiner.com was an American news website based in Denver, Colorado, that operated using a network of "pro-am contributors"' for content. It had various local editions with contributors posting city-based items tailored to 238 markets throughout the United States and parts of Canada in two putative national editions, one for each country.
The San Francisco Examiner is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and published since 1863.
Christian Frederick "Chris" Gulker was an American photographer, programmer, writer, and pioneer in electronic publishing.
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Media related to San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 at Wikimedia Commons
