The New York Times, which has a daily circulation of 49,000 in the Bay Area (65,000 on Sundays), will launch its Bay Area section tomorrow (Oct. 16), with coverage of “Arts & culture, style & dining, politics & public affairs, San Francisco & Silicon Valley,” according to an e-mail to subscribers. The section will appear Fridays and Sundays.

Columnists in the new section include Daniel Weintraub, a longtime Sacramento Bee political columnist, and Scott James, a novelist and founder of the the SoMa Literary Review in San Francisco.

The Times’ “Media Decoder” blog reported this morning:

At first, most of the editing and reporting will be done by Times staff journalists, but the plan calls for turning the bulk of that work over to a local operation after a few months. A nonprofit consortium that includes KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley’s, graduate school of journalism, has been in talks with The Times about taking over the added work.

The consortium is being organized by Wells Fargo heir F. Warren Hellman, who has promised to donate $5 million and said he may ask the city of San Francisco to help fund the journalism effort.

The Times is looking to add local pages in other markets, the next being Chicago, according to a Sept. 4 Times story.

The Wall Street Journal, which has toppled USA Today as the nation’s No. 1 circulation daily, is planning a San Francisco edition that will probably launch in November or December, but it looks as if the Times will be first.

The Times’ e-mail told subscribers they can meet two of the paper’s editors (they didn’t identify them) at a special Times-sponsored panel discussion following the screening of “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” at the Mill Valley Film Festival on Oct. 17-18.