The view out the front of the Rogue Valley Times new office overlooks Main and Front streets in downtown Medford.

The Rogue Valley Times moved into its new home this week, shuffling a couple of blocks from the old JCPenney building at Sixth and Central in downtown Medford to the old Key Bank building at Main and Front.

Looking out of our front windows we can see Elements Tapas Bar and the railroad tracks that cross Main Street. Out the back windows, we can see the RVTD bus depot, Channel 5, Oh’s Osaka and the famous Indestructible Loo.

It already feels like home.

Our new building has three floors. The first floor — where the teller windows and the main bank vault are still in place — is empty. Maybe we’ll expand into it some day if things work out. The third floor is occupied by architect Gene Abell, who showed up Thursday with wrapped boxes of confections to officially welcome us into the building.

We’re nestled into the second floor.

Our move came almost exactly four months after we sprang into existence. The Rogue Valley Times website went live Feb. 6. Movers transported our furniture into the new digs Monday, June 5, and the newsroom worked from home — something we became good at during the pandemic — for a couple of days while our IT people got things set up. We cranked out our first news stories from the new newsroom Wednesday, June 7.

We’re up to 23 employees at this point, assuming the company phone list I just consulted is accurate.

We topped another milestone this week — definitely the most important milestone mentioned in this column: Our circulation topped 6,000 — counting paid subscriptions and single-copy sales in local stores. The official number as of June 3 was 6,075.

When I started working at the Mail Tribune 16 years ago, our Sunday circulation was about 30,000, so we have a ways to go before we can start resting on our laurels. But we are steadily increasing our reach, and that feels good.

Speaking of the Mail Tribune, another significant event occurred this week. The paper’s website disappeared, as noted in Opinion Editor Robert Galvin’s “Thinking Out Loud” column.

I noticed it was gone on Tuesday. It’s no big surprise. It hadn’t been updated since the paper folded Jan. 13. But it was still a valuable resource and a useful tool. We used it nearly daily right until the day it died. For instance, our cops and courts reporter Kevin Opsahl is covering a murder trial this week in Jackson County Circuit Court. The murders happened more than four years ago, and the Mail Tribune wrote about the murders when they happened. Kevin was able to go to the MT website and read up on the murders as he prepared to cover the trial.

That’s just one small example of what was lost when the website went down. The stories on the site went back to 1997. Many thousands of stories are now beyond search range. Some people will be happy about that — including all the people whose names appeared in the police log, convicted criminals, and people whose worst days were chronicled for public consumption.

But the site also contained so many stories of triumph and personal tragedy that no one will be able to easily find with a Google search.

One treasure trove of information I’ll miss are all of the hiking stories we assembled over the years. The MT published a Hike of the Week nearly every week for at least 20 years. Many are the days that I called up one of those stories before heading out for a weekend hike, to refresh my memory about trail mileages and waypoints — and for the all-important directions to the trailhead. 

I felt the loss this week when my wife and I were planning a kayak trip to a spring creek in Klamath County. Outdoors writer Lee Juillerat had kayaked the creek about six years ago and wrote about it. I wanted the directions to the launching point and went to the MT website to find the story. But instead of finding it, I was confronted with a screen that said, “An error has occurred.”

“That’s a fact,” I told my screen. “An error truly has occurred. Who flushes a community’s memories down the commode?” 

That experience confirms the importance of the move into our new home this week. We can’t do anything about the loss of our community’s memories. But we can sure as hell do something about creating new ones.

Thank you to the 6,075 people who subscribed and bought papers last week.

If you see value in what we’re doing, think about supporting our reporting by signing up for a subscription.

— David Smigelski, editor