“Good news” and “newspaper” are terms that rarely meet in the same sentence these days, but the Seattle Times got a dose this past week. The trade magazine Editor & Publisher reported a Nielsen survey on how much time online visitors spent on major papers’ websites—a main measure of their value to readers and advertisers—in June versus the same month last year. On NYTimes.com and Houston’s Chron.com, the two sites where readers formerly lingered longest, average times fell by half, from an average 29-plus minutes to less than 15. Time spent also declined at washingtonpost.com and the Wall Street Journal Online. But it rose at several other newspaper sites and quadrupled at the Boston Globe’s—where, according to Nielsen, readers averaged a whopping 32 minutes, up from eight last year. Maybe institutional crisis stirs reader interest; June marked at the peak of the Globe’s much-publicized travails, when its owner, the New York Times, threatened to close it if unions didn’t yield. (They eventually did.)

So what explains a big rise in lingering at seattletimes.com, from nine minutes to nearly 19? One big event intervened between the two Junes: the retreat of the rival Post-Intelligencer from print to a thinly staffed online edition. Are former P-I readers turning to seattletimes.com even if they aren’t subscribing to the printed Times? They don’t seem to be spending more time at seattlepi.com; the average stay there plummeted from 11 minutes to five minutes, 24 seconds.