I was invited to speak Monday at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Medford Library and walked away feeling pretty good about being in the newspaper business.

I started my talk about “What it’s like to start a newspaper from scratch” by asking how many of the roughly 50 people in the room were subscribers. Nearly every person raised their hand. I think the few who didn’t were clutching the sandwiches supplied by Great Harvest Bread Company.

When I finished my presentation, I asked for questions, and again the hands shot skyward. People peppered me with questions, and the theme that emerged was “more.”

People want more obits. More advertising inserts. More opinion pages. More columnists. And a Sunday paper. 

I thought I might get some blowback from the group for a story we published the previous week headlined “City officials put Medford library on notice,” in which the library was criticized by officials from the city, Rogue Valley Transportation District and others for not providing better security. Medford City Manager Brian Sjothun was quoted in the article as saying, “If this was a private residence or another business, we would be issuing notifications to shut it down.”

That article and another we published a few days earlier — about crime and vandalism in the downtown — led to a community meeting organized by the Downtown Medford Association and the Medford Police Department that drew 200 people on a Wednesday night.

That meeting almost certainly would not have happened had the Rogue Valley Times not published those stories.

As part of my talk, I gave a quick rundown of the most-read stories since we started publishing Feb. 6.

Our first “most-read” story was about Blackbird Shopping Center‘s efforts to train two talking myna birds to replace previous mascots that had fluttered off to the great nest in the sky.

That story was supplanted by “Neighbor War,” a story about County Surveyor Scott Fein’s feud with his neighbors and code violations he faces.

That story stayed at the top for less than a week before being blown from its perch by news that a new restaurant was moving into the venerable Jacksonville Inn. One thing that made that story’s meteoric rise up the analytics chart noteworthy is that we posted it on a Friday evening, generally a dead time for newspaper websites. But that didn’t matter once people started sharing it on Facebook, and it kept garnering readers for days afterward. People around here love the Jacksonville Inn.

The story that pushed it to second place was about a man hunting for morels who was attacked near Gold Hill by what he believed was a wolf. The man was seriously injured and needed a lift from Mercy Flights to get him to the emergency room. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reported a couple days later that DNA testing had detected no wolf DNA, and the follow-up story attracted nearly as many eyeballs as the original.

As I ran down that list of top stories in our first two months of operation, heads nodded around the room at the library. The people present had read those stories.

Then I nervously told them what happened to our analytics dashboard when the “Library on notice” story was published. It flamed. Literally. The dashboard shows us what people are reading at any given time. Shortly after the library story posted, an icon of a flame appeared next to it. A red flame that pulsed … boom, boom, boom. It only does that when more than 200 people are reading a story at one time. That red flame pulsed for a couple of days. It was mesmerizing. More than 18,000 people read it. That made it the most-read story in our short history.

I have no doubt its reign will be short. 

— David Smigelski, editor