The Seattle Times | MYNorthwest.com
The Seattle Times will begin a digital-subscription plan in March, Times Executive Editor David Boardman told readers in a column Sunday. The plan resembles The New York Times' paywall -- print subscribers will have full access to the Times' site, and nonsubscribers will be able to access a limited number of articles before hitting the pay gate. There's a digital-only deal for $3.99/week, or for the same price you can get the Sunday paper plus full access. "The reasons for this development are simple," Boardman -- a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board -- writes.

The economics of the news business, and of the newspaper industry in particular, have changed dramatically over the past decade. More people than ever are reading our content in print and digital formats, but our primary source of revenue — advertising — is declining locally and nationally and no longer supports our costs to the degree it once did.

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Scott R. Maier and Staci Tucker of the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication studied how stories played in the print and online editions of The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune and The Seattle Times, as well as the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer. What they call "story consonance" was "sporadic and generally weak":

The digital metro newspapers differed sharply in story selection even from their parent newspapers. On average, only one in five of the top news stories posted on The Seattle Times websites was identical or similar to the stories found on the same day's front page of its print edition. In Minneapolis, the difference was even more pronounced: less than 8 percent of the top stories posted on StarTribune.com were in common with the Star-Tribune's print edition.

The researchers mimicked the Project Excellence in Journalism's methodology in its News Coverage Index. Their study looked at 725 stories in May 2010. (more...)

Seattle Times | Honolulu Civil Beat
Rob McKenna hasn't conceded the Washington state gubernatorial race, and Seattle Times politics writer Jim Brunner says the "math doesn't look promising" for the Republican.

Trailing by nearly 50,000 votes statewide, McKenna would need to capture 52 percent of the remaining 1.3 million estimated remaining ballots, a Seattle Times analysis found. He was getting 48.7 percent as of Tuesday night.

McKenna ran as a moderate in a state that also legalized recreational marijuana use and gay marriage in Tuesday's elections. But Democrats, Brunner writes, "spread the message that McKenna 'isn't who he says he is.' " One ally McKenna had in getting a counter-message out: The Seattle Times, which gave him ads worth about $75,000, which "company executives described as an experiment to show the power of newspaper political advertising," Brunner and Andrew Garber reported last month. Staffers at the paper protested the decision, saying it created "a perception that we are not an independent watchdog."

The Times also ran ads in favor of the gay marriage referendum.

In another political race with a media subnarrative, former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano lost his bid to be Honolulu's mayor, blaming "special interest groups that spent millions of dollars on attack ads and other campaign tactics," Nathan Eagle and Nick Grube report in Honolulu Civil Beat. In February, Cayetano tried to get Civil Beat reporter Michael Levine booted from covering his campaign because he didn't like the way Levine was covering him. Cayetano's stance “is potentially indicative of his demeanor and his approach to people who disagree with him,” John Temple, then Civil Beat's editor, told Poynter at the time. Levine would stay on the story, Temple said.

News Leadership 3.0 | Editors Weblog
The Seattle Times has reorganized its newsroom to a digital-first structure with three personnel roles: creation, curation and community. Reporters and editors create content, production staff curates it into different products and platforms, and engagement staff builds community around it. The reorganization puts Kathy Best, the former digital managing editor, in charge of all news gathering and aims to break the traditional focus on print production cycles. || Previously: How The Seattle Times Is Using Mobile Video, Twitter to Report News Fast