On March 9, a Thursday, city editor Troy Heie and I sat down to map out story placement for the Saturday paper.

We had a list of stories that reporters were working on and others that had already been posted to our website that day. We had several good options for the lead centerpiece on A1, including a story about an atmospheric river barreling toward Southern Oregon and Northern California with the potential to boost our ailing reservoirs.

The above-the-fold options did not initially include a story about plans by the city of Medford to reduce Main Street to two lanes downtown and put in a two-way bike lane. We saw that story as downpage material. Possibly page A3.

Then we looked at our web traffic — what we refer to as our analytics. The bike lane story was blowing up online, generating the most traffic on our website. On our Facebook page, it was spurring a lively discussion and had been shared numerous times. We refer to that kind of action as engagement. People were engaged. They were talking about it; arguing about it. It hit a nerve. That convinced us put it in the lead position on A1.

Analytics have become one of the most important tools in an editor’s kit. We begin our morning staff meeting every day with an analytics report by Julia Moore, one of two audience and engagement editors in our parent company, EO Media Group.

She tells us which stories from the past few days have attracted readers, how much time they spent on our stories before moving on. It helps us know which stories deserve follow-ups. Sometimes readers point out holes in stories or offer new avenues to pursue. We value that information, and we use it.

Sometimes Julia gives us weekly reports, and this week we got our first monthly report. From Feb. 6 to March 14, 55,596 people had visited RV-Times.com and viewed 684,597 pages, spending about 10 minutes per session.

In scientific terms, those numbers rock. Especially when you consider that we didn’t exist 45 days ago. When we flicked the switch on our website Feb. 6, we were like late-night DJs during a storm when phone service is down, wondering whether anyone was out there listening. We launched with a website full of local stories, but we had no idea who — if anyone — would read them.

We had no subscribers yet — well, actually, we had one, Debbie Saxbury, whose father, the former mayor of Central Point, had been Subscriber No. 1 for the Central Point Times in 1964. She was following in her dad’s footsteps.

As of Thursday, we had 3,815 print subscribers, 915 online-only subscribers, and are selling an average of 1,125 papers at local stores each publishing day. 

I’m happy to be able to share these numbers. It represents a commitment to transparency by our company. At the last newspaper I worked for, analytics were kept secret — not just from the public, but even from most employees. Subscriber numbers were especially guarded. The owner didn’t want anybody to know how many papers — or how few — he was printing.

That newspaper is out of business now, and I firmly believe that lack of transparency was a major factor in its demise. That’s not a mistake we’ll make.

— David Smigelski, Rogue Valley Times editor

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