PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- The largest union at Philadelphia's two biggest daily newspapers is planning to launch an online newspaper to compete with the company Web site if workers go on strike after midnight on Thursday.
Employees from The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News would contribute local content that will be edited and posted online, said Stu Bykofsky, a Daily News columnist and spokesman for their union, The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia.
"It's to provide news and information for the community so they won't be deprived," he said.
In competing with Philly.com, the union's PhilaPapers.com would sell ads and function like an online news site, covering major stories as well as the strike itself, said Tom Ferrick, Jr., chief steward at the Inquirer newsroom and a columnist.
About 200 people are expected to staff the site, which is to include news, politics, business, sports and entertainment sections. While there would not be any direct union advocacy, the site would have links to other sites that tell the union's viewpoint, Ferrick said.
Jay Devine, spokesman for owner Philadelphia Media Holdings, declined to comment on the union plan but said talks are "making good progress and we're hopeful."
The issues dividing the two sides include the owners' proposal to take over the pension plan and do away with seniority status for employees.
Bykofsky said about 700 of the more than 900 Guild members at the two papers have filled out strike eligibility forms, which would qualify them for benefits during work stoppage.
On Thursday morning, the two papers' nine other unions plan to meet to decide whether they would support a strike, said Joseph Lyons, president of the Philadelphia Newspaper Council of Unions.
Strikers would picket the papers' headquarters on Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia, editorial offices in Cherry Hill, N.J., and a printing plant in Conshohocken, Pa. If workers go on strike, it will be the papers' first walkout since a 1985 strike that lasted more than six weeks.
"It's a whole lot easier to put news on a Web site than to put out a paper," said longtime newspaper industry analyst John Morton, but he cautioned that it was unclear how successful such a move would be in the long run.
"It's very hard for a strike Web site to lure advertisers away from an established name," Morton said.
