The New York Times Friday debuted a Bay Area section that will appear every Friday and Sunday in Northern California print editions, reaching as far north as the Oregon border.
Jim Schacter, editor of the New York Times’ digital initiatives, said the company’s interest in the Bay Area stems from its cosmopolitan audience, the existing popularity of the newspaper (the Bay Area is already its biggest print market outside of the Northeast) and recent "disinvestment" in local journalism by local news organizations.
Next week the company is starting a blog titled “The Bay Area” that will allow conversation about the region’s issues to circuit the Web. This Bay Area initiative began before schedule, beating the Wall Street Journal’s proposed Bay Area section.
Along with an existing 10-person San Francisco news bureau, contributing columnists include Scott James (pen name Kemble Scott), founder of the SoMa Literary Review in San Francisco. He will write the Barbary Coast column every Friday. Daniel Weintraub, a columnist at the Sacramento Bee, will weigh in on politics and public affairs.
The Times initially plans to collaborate with local journalism organizations, including the Bay Area News Project, a nonprofit news organization that has proposed a collaboration involving KQED Public Radio, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and the family foundation run by Wells Fargo heir Warren Hellman.
Schachter identified Chicago as the Times’ next target — another parallel cosmopolitan audience with a flailing local new source, the Chicago Tribune. Schachter said he could not give a time frame for that launch. The extra pages will be supported, like The Bay Area section, by local advertisers.
