This morning brings another skinny 26-page SeaTimes, with only eight major staff-written news stories. Nevertheless, a laudatory NY Times piece relays that the SeaTimes is now claims to be “operating in the black,” though the Blethens are quiet about the financial metrics they’re using to make this claim.

The NYT story also notes the SeaTimes circulation has risen from 200,000 to 260,000, having kept most of the P-I subscriptions it had inherited in March.

However, that’s still a drop from the former combined circulation of the SeaTimes-dominated Joint Operating Agreement, which had been approximately 311,000 at the print P-I‘s demise.

Still, the SeaTimes’ current readership is close to its ’90s, pre-Internet peak.

Just don’t expect the paper to restore its newsroom staff size to ’90s levels. Not with the ad market still so shaky.