To protest the Hearst Corporation's plan to shoulder San Francisco Chronicle employees with an additional health care burden, members of the Chronicle staff plan to step away from their desks at precisely 3:15 p.m. tomorrow afternoon to step outside, do a couple laps of the building at Fifth and Mission, maybe have a smoke break or something, and then get right back to work.

Kat Anderson, speaking for the Friends of the S.F. Chronicle Guild, told SFist today that the demonstration is not a strike or walkout at this point — the workers are still on speaking terms with Hearst Corp and are hopeful that negotiations will continue until the newspaper workers can get a fair deal on their health care costs. Workers are simply encouraged to take their afternoon break at the same time, preferably while wearing red.

Last year union members at the New York Times staged a similar event to show their opposition to proposed contract terms at the Grey Lady. The protest at the Times saw some 375 workers hitting the streets for a brief walkout that inspired tomorrow's action at the Chronicle. The Bay Area's paper of record only has 277 workers total (some of whom may be strapped to their desks under deadline), but the Media Workers Guild is hopeful some of their pals in labor will be coming out to bolster the effort.

After yesterday's social media campaign, the group figures they reached some 140,000 people through the tweets and retweets of the 30 or so journalists who picked up the story. Although it crashed a few times, the group says their website got 2,400 hits and 268 out of 500 signatures to their petition. A second petition also has over 2,000 signatures.

If you're in the neighborhood of Fifth and Mission tomorrow and you see more folks than usual milling about, take this 15 minute opportunity to buy them a quick pint at the Tempest.

Notice anything different about SFGate.com today? Probably not, but the paper of record has moved some random amount of special content behind a for-subscribers-only paywall site at SFChronicle.com. Articles on SFGate.com will still be free and readers will be able to get all 102 photos in the "Celebrities Who Just Rub You The Wrong Way" slideshow, but if you want yet a Chronicle article about the toll booths on the Golden Gate Bridge, it'll cost you.

That cost, if you're wondering, is about $12 per month for online access with the Sunday edition printed on real paper and sent to your home every week to be consumed alongside your morning coffee. As the SFAppeal points out, it costs about $10 to print that Sunday edition, so it is unclear how that works out as a win for the paper except that they'll be able to tell advertisers that circulation went up on the Sunday edition. If you're among the paperless technocrats who already subscribe to SFGate.com via Kindle or other Chronicle digital subscription, you'll still need to add on the $12 bucks a month for "Ultimate Access" to SFChronicle.com.

Exactly which content has been moved to the Chronicle's new "premium" site is a little baffling as well. All those slideshows and traffic reports and will stay on SFGate for free, but the paper's columnists — which even the paper admits are one of the only reasons for its continued existence — are getting moved over to the new site.

As one Chronicle employee in the advertising department explained it to a disillusioned reader on Reddit:

"Some of our columnists will move to a blog and column system where their column, as it appeared in the morning's paper, will be available on SFChronicle.com while their blog, which will not be entirely the same content, will remain on SFGate.com but will feature a link to their column as well. They are two different media (blog and column) and should be treated separately."

In the case of yacht rock fan and Sixth Street watchdog C.W. Nevius, for example, that means readers get confessional livejournal entries like this post about receiving death threats from bike activists and pit bull owners, or this missive about [sic] "On line dating," texting and kids these days, that won't be found anywhere in the paper.

The rest of Nevblog, as we'll be calling it now, is made up of short synopses that end with a note asking readers to "click here" to read the rest. This week's Saturday column got a lead-in that sums up his stance on Mark Leno's (brilliant) proposal to allow California cities to move last call to 4 a.m.: "Wow, does that sound like a bad idea." The real column, which no one feels like reading now because Chuck (or his copyeditor) packaged it so neatly, is behind the fence at SFChronicle.com. (Which: Hey! That's our job.) Or you could still read it here on SFGate for free. Like we said: baffling.

As one SFGate.com's always charming commenters wrote in the blog comments, "I LOVE these new shorter articles! They're so quick and easy to read!" As if the Chron's effort to herd readers to the subscription site is actually driving them away. Likewise, Michael Bauer's restaurant reviews are now behind the paywall, giving local food bloggers the chance to nab some pageviews their own truncated versions.

Meanwhile, back over at the SFAppeal, former SFist editor Rita Hao has sprung for a subscription and will be spending the week blogging her observations. Today she's already discovered the clean design of the new site just looks like "someone took all the turquoise off SFGate.com" and the content itself is a disappointing mix of AP stories with little to no original content. "I'd be willing to pay $12/month for good an interesting journalism — on anything!" She writes. But "$12 for reformatted AP articles and Matier and Ross? I don’t know, guys."

Previously: SF Chronicle Demands Fair Health Care Via Online Campaign

We here at SFist need to rib the Chronicle or SFGate now and then. In turn, they need to send us angry emails demanding our phone number. It's a dysfunctional relationship, but it works, damnit. Now, however, we're concerned about our fellow print and online publishing ilk at Mission and Fifth. They're in need of fair health care from the Hearst Corporation.

Online via MediaWorkers.org, they write:

We, the employees of the San Francisco Chronicle, have had enough.

We love this newspaper, and we’ve worked hard since the layoffs of 2009 to help keep it afloat. We’ve done everything Hearst demanded: sacrificing pay raises, giving up seniority, losing vacation time and holidays, even working through what used to be our paid lunch hour.

For years, we’ve been working twice as hard with a smaller staff — doing everything needed to keep this paper relevant and great.

And this is how the highly profitable Hearst Corporation pays us back.

In our ongoing Guild contract negotiations, Hearst continues to insist that we shoulder huge increases for our health plan. Even offset by a meager proposed raise, this amounts to a pay cut of hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for most of us.

We love the Chronicle, and we love journalism, but we can’t keep donating our own livelihoods to increase the profits of our corporate owners.

Help us tell Hearst that San Francisco deserves better.

Tough times ahead for newspapers. Learn more about how you can help here and here.

Speaking of paying, SF Chronicle wants you to dip into your wallets, too. The Chron (but not SFGate) is now behind a paywall.

Yesterday, in an attempt to get Internet readers to click on something as many times as possible, SFGate.com ran a second edition of "You know you're a real San Franciscan if you..." Somewhere along the way, an intern picked out this photo of two Muni transfers from photographer Rubin Starset's flickr stream. The problem with that, of course, is that photographers can be a protective bunch (and rightfully so). So, feeling spurned by SFGate's failure to keep his proper attribution intact, Starset did what any good citizen of the Internet would do: he ripped all of the content on SFGate and repackaged it as FriscoGate.com.

FriscoGate is pretty much an exact replica of the site we know and love (cough), aside from the don't-call-it-that contraction — apparently a smirking nod towards the fact that SFGate themselves can't stop calling it 'Frisco.

Anyway, Starset was right to claim credit for his work. (To be fair though, the site did include his flickr name.) And we're not entirely sure how this screws over the Hearst Corporation since the ads on FriscoGate still seem to point to their intended SFGate destinations. But if nothing else, it gave us a bit of a chuckle this morning.

Meanwhile, the offending slide in the SFGate's 50+ page slideshow has apparently been taken down. Whether that's because of Starset's "annoying" email to the paper or because the caption implied that real San Franciscans get their "Muni transfers double punched to get an extra ride later" — not an actual thing anybody has ever done as far as we can tell — has yet to be determined.

[Starset.net] via [Reddit]

[Note: Because SFGate and the Chronicle are technically different entities, we've changed some our language to reflect that.]

Liz Lufkin, who's most recently been the vice president responsible for front-page editorial programming at Yahoo and who once upon a time co-founded SFGate, has been ousted from Yahoo in a reorg. Editor-in-chief Jai Singh, who recently came to the company from the Huffington Post, couldn't find room on his team for Lufkin, as All Things D reports. This means that Yahoo's front page, which sees millions and millions of hits a day, will likely soon be changing, and maybe getting a little less boring?

We probably can not blame Lufkin for the ongoing boringness and complete lack of editorial priorities on the SFGate homepage — seeing as she's long gone from the site and the Chronicle SFGate hasn't seen fit to do much with it in ten years. But we're sure some of you can!

Singh's experience at the HuffPo is likely to bring a tabloid-y, link-bait-y element to Yahoo, but time will tell.

[Business Insider]
[All Things D]

The most popular story on the 'Gate right now? That would be Matier and Ross's column about the wheelchair ramp to the Board President's chair, currently being constructed in the Board of Supervisors chamber, whose total cost looks to be topping out at about $700,000 after design and construction. It's kind of a symbolic ramp, is the thing, with Chiu -- who doesn't require a wheelchair -- defending the project by saying "San Francisco has been at the forefront of access issues, and it's important the board reflect that." John Avalos was the only supervisor to vote against the project, which, because of issues surrounding the historic room, etc., was originally estimated to cost $1 million. [Update: Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, who is paraplegic, threatened to sue over this ramp back in '08, when the Board initially rejected the $1.1 million price tag.]

"This is a tremendous amount of money being spent on something in City Hall that rarely or may never even get used," Avalos said.

The project is set to take 10 weeks to complete, and the Board will be spending $50,000 on relocating their meetings when they're back in session.

Needless to say, the commenters are rip-roarin mad. Example: "Do liberals simply have no sense of much money they are wasting? I mean do they balance their own checkbooks? In what world is this not complete disaster of execution? What a bunch of useless losers."

PREVIOUSLY: Phil Bronstein Notices How Awful SFGate Commenters Are, Scolds Them

We ourselves tend to avoid doing too much scrolling on SFGate for fear that our eyes will fall upon the shrill, vitriolic, frequently ALL-CAPPED stupidity that is their commenter pool. Today, Phil Bronstein can't take it anymore and pens an editorial about what assholes these commenters all seem to be, now that they pounced upon two recent tragedies -- the three hikers swept over the falls at Yosemite, and a Marin man who got washed into a blowhole in Maui by a rogue wave -- as excuses to mouth off about how dumb the victims were.

"How much courage does it take to be mean about the dead?" asks Bronstein. "Or to scold them for dying accidentally?" We should point out to Phil that "courage" and "online commenting" are pretty much never in the same sentence.

Among the comments he points to: "Darwin award candidate right here folks," - re: the Maui tragedy. And "What a blowhole for getting that close."

It turns out Bronstein's motive for suddenly piping up about the vitriol is that he has a personal connection to Tika Hick, whose partner of 11 years and father of her 6-month-old son, David Potts, was the guy lost in Maui. "She is one of my sons' preschool teachers, an expansively kind and compassionate person."

He goes on to try to make the smirky commenters feel as bad as possible:

Life itself had already piled on that family. Tika learned she had stage IV breast cancer weeks after giving birth. David was a successful contractor-builder who took a hit in the recession and recently declared bankruptcy. Then they lost their home.

Are we smirking yet?

They were in Hawaii with friends and family to snatch some respite before Tika went in for a double mastectomy.

Well, anyhow, Phil. We feel you. But we ourselves try to moderate our comments a little better (and thank you, SFist crew, for remaining pretty classy about the Yosemite thing). As blogger Anil Dash recently pointed out, we are two decades into this internet thing, and a solid decade into the Age of Commenting, and "If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault." Maybe if SFGate hadn't been such an anonymous free-for-all all this time, not always quite in touch with the ways of the internet despite being the news org of record in the nation's most tech-heavy town, you wouldn't have to pen such editorials in 2011.

On the Bay Citizen's weekend edition, the burning-someone-else's money (but still free) publication reports (sort of) on the Hearst Corporation's sudden decision to (maybe) put a majority of the free content on SFGate.com behind a restrictive paywall. According to the Bay Citizen's many anonymous sources within the city's paper of record, it would appear much of the staff is convinced their parent company will begin charging for a large majority of SFGate.com's currently free content before the end of the month. Unfortunately, none of them seem sure enough about the details to go on the record about it.

If the speculation from unnamed staffers turns out to be true, a digital subscription could end up running readers $9.95 a month and only "short, daily news pieces and breaking stories" would remain free of charge. Contrast that with a plan like the New York Times' recent paywall announcement which allows non-subscribers to view 20 articles per month and doesn't block out users who come from search engines or other social media sources - and you begin to see the speculated "hard paywall" at the Chronicle would mean cutting off a huge chunk of the online audience for a site that actually does well in Internet traffic.

As it stands currently, the Chronicle encourages subscriptions by blocking access to certain embargoed stories that appear in print two days before they become available online. The Bay Citizen piece neglects to look in to the impact these embargoes have had on single-issue sales or circulation numbers, but if we take yesterday's big story, Michael Bauer's revised Top 100 list as anecdotal evidence: you've probably noticed the Internet has already ripped all the meat off of that story. And as far as we know, only one person actually bought a paper to read it.

Still, over here at SFist, we're not getting fired up about what this could mean for our own traffic numbers (or, gross, our comment section) just yet. Most of the details mentioned are qualified as "in flux" and reporters at the paper have mentioned, "Many staffers still have no clear idea of exactly what the changes will look like." So, yes: many grains of salt.

[BayCitizen]
[HuffPo]
[Grubstreet]