The Rogue Valley Times took a big step this week with the hiring of a publisher.

David Sommers, the publisher of the Long Beach Post in Southern California, is coming north with his wife and children to take the reins of the RV Times and help solidify our place in the community.

Sommers’ hiring follows the arrival earlier this month of Cheryl McKenzie as advertising sales director. McKenzie’s job is to build a sales team from scratch — while learning new computer and content management systems and doing her best to sell ads at the same time. She might even get to eat and sleep from time to time.

It’s a juggling act, to be sure — and it’s a common theme in these early days of the paper. We have to report the news all day, every day, and put out three printed papers a week, while trying to do long-term tasks such as interviewing prospective reporters, sales associates and office support staff … and do the short-term stuff like shopping.

We still don’t have a police scanner in the newsroom, but that’s coming soon. We still don’t have enough furniture, file cabinets, reporter’s notebooks, pens, file folders, waste baskets, scissors or staplers.

Why? It’s hard to find time to go shopping because the news never sleeps, and it always seems more important to write and edit stories and process photos to keep the website full of fresh content.

It took more than a month to get us set up with OJCIN, which is the portal into the state court system. It allows us to see court calendars so we know what trials are coming up, and lets us look up the records of people facing dates with the judge. It took just as long to get us set up with Pacer, the federal courts equivalent of OCJIN. 

It took about three weeks to get our weather page designed and ordered, and we’re still not 100% there with our comics page and puzzles.

But day by day, we’re getting there. And readers seem to be finding us.

We set a daily record last Saturday for the number of visitors to rv-times.com — 8,744 people logged onto the site that day. Up to that point we were averaging closer to 3,800 website visitors a day, so we more than doubled our usual numbers.

For the week, 29,592 people visited our news site, and they viewed 171,140 pages.

The most-read story on the website this week was “Neighbor War,” a story by Damian Mann about a feud between county Surveyor Scott Fein and his neighbor Scott Ford.

Things got interesting when Fein threatened to sue us if we reported about the code violations he faces.

Another day, another government official held accountable. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get those wastebaskets.

— David Smigelski, editor