Seattle Times’ Digital Package Unveils Substantial Reporting on Our Changing Seas

By: Alexis Sobel Fitts | CJR

Like most newspapers around the country, The Seattle Times has cut staff and shaved resources in recent years to balance the ever diminishing budget of the modern newspaper. But unlike many of its counterparts, the Times has managed to continue publishing strong science coverage, maintaining both a science and an environmental reporter and producing impressive enterprise work, like last year’s investigation into methadone, a highly addictive painkiller offered disproportionately to Medicaid patients.

So it’s surprising, but not out of character, that when the paper unveiled a new splashy multimedia piece this past weekend—in the style of Snowfall and Riptide—the story it displayed was a mammoth work of environmental reporting. And unlike Snowfall (or Riptide or whatever that horse racing thing was about) the intensive resources drain is not in service of a swishy narrative, but crucial, hard-nosed journalism of global consequences.