Wyden Times

We spent a fair amount of time this week pondering the way the Rogue Valley Times website looks on a mobile phone, after we learned that more than 80% of the people who came to our site last month came via their smartphones.

That’s the highest percentage we’ve seen from our analytics reports, which — among many other things — tell us how many people visit our site via desktop computers, tablets, smart TVs and phones. 

In the office, we have large monitors on our desks, letting us see broadsheet pages and the website in full size. It probably isn’t the best way for us to judge the effectiveness of our layouts if most people are looking at them through a palm-sized device.

We’ll be trying out different ways to present photos and graphics to be sure they pop for handheld users.

Another interesting number that came in last month’s analytics report is the average amount of time e-edition users spent reading the online paper — a whopping 48 minutes and 17 seconds. In the world of analytics, that’s an eternity. I’ve seen numbers — referred to as average engagement time — down around a minute or two for other newspapers. You can’t do much more than scan headlines in a minute, or maybe pop in after clicking on a link in Facebook, read a couple of paragraphs of the story that drew you in, then pop back to Facebook.

The most-read stories on our site this week were both stories by RV Times reporter Buffy Pollock relating to homeless issues in Medford. The most-read story — which broke the record for most-viewed stories since we launched rv-times.com Feb. 6 — was about a dad who spoke out after an unsettling bike ride through homeless camps on the Bear Creek Greenway with his daughter. 

The second most-read story was about a cleanup of that same stretch of Greenway a few days later by the Medford Police Department Livability Team and the city parks department.

On Friday we got a visit from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who toured the newsroom and met the Times staff.

He displayed a remarkable memory for the times he had met various members of our staff over the years, and he told us some stories about growing up as the son of a journalist. Then he left to conduct his 1,049th town hall since taking office in 1996, accompanied by an aide name America Silva, a Phoenix High grad we profiled as part of the senator’s visit.

— David Smigelski, editor