any changes to the production facility, such as introducing color, would have required the consent of both parties to the agreement, and the Chronicle wasn't interested. To produce color for the new press, the Examiner therefore had to handle it in the newsroom. Gulker became director of development in November 1992. In 1994, Gulker's editorial workflow system, dubbed the "virtual newsroom", was demonstrated at both Seybold shows and supported the creation of "a real Internet newspaper that used the 'Net throughout the process from story and photo solicitation to delivery." The system provided the publishing infrastructure for The Gate, the online newspaper jointly operated by the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, which made its precipitous debut on November 3, 1994 and came to be officially launched on April 5, 1995. Electric Examiner and the strike of 1994 In 1994, as "a staff of one" and encouraged by the owner of The Examiner, William Randolph Hearst III, Gulker came to run a pilot project called The Electric Examiner, which routed wire-service stories to the Web. Gulker wanted to expand this "prototype of a future Web site" to distributing the actual reporting produced at the Examiner but was frustrated in this ambition, as the Examiner was bound by a joint operating agreement with its local rival, the San Francisco Chronicle, and could not move on its own when it came to venturing into new distribution modes. When Gulker's project was previewed in August 1994 under the name The Gate as a joint operation between the two newspapers, it was judged the "furthest ahead" among efforts to bring newspapers online. The Electric Examiner became a focus of attention in the first two weeks of November 1994, when San Francisco's two major newspapers were hit by a strike in which some 2,600 journalists, editors, lorry drivers, press operators and paper handlers walked off their jobs. Gulker did not join them. He sided with management and set to work launching The Gate ahead of its scheduled debut in late November by modifying his system so that the Electric Examiner would now appear daily on The Gate. For the duration of the strike, Gulker's operation, which remained "heavily dependent on wire-service stories" for lack of contributing journalists and editors, was the official online version of San Francisco's two largest newspapers. On one day during the strike, according to Gulker, "the Examiner delivered 80,000