From the editor’s desk: ‘What’s the wood?’

Published 11:00 pm Friday, June 16, 2023

In the 1994 Ron Howard movie “The Paper” — starring Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei, Glenn Close, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall — the staff of the fictional New York Sun must answer the question, “What’s the wood?”

The wood is the most important story of the day. It’s the story that will be on the cover of that day’s tabloid. The search for the wood is what drives their daily budget meetings.

In the Rogue Valley Times newsroom, the discussion every day includes the question, “What’s the wood? — which refers to the story at the top of our website.

The staff of the Sun needed to answer that question just once a day.

We want to know, “What’s our morning wood?” What’s our noon wood?” “What’s our afternoon wood bump?” What’s our evening wood?”

A wood bump is when the current wood is knocked off the top of the rv-times.com homepage and into the “wood rail,” which is a list of six stories that follow the wood. That’s all we get at the top of the page. Seven stories. The wood and six stories in the wood rail.

That is the prime real estate. The stories that hit your eye as soon as you go to the site. 

We have 6 a.m. wood, noon wood, afternoon wood and evening wood, because we want to make sure we rotate new stories into the wood, so that when readers go to our site throughout the day, they see fresh content.

It doesn’t stop there, because we have numerous “buckets” on the website: local news, lifestyles, sports, opinion, outdoors, Go! Rogue and Nation/World. We try to keep all of those buckets fresh as well, but it’s the wood that drives our discussions. 

This week, we faced wood dilemmas several times. When we bump the wood, the top story flows into the wood rail, and pushes the other stories down. Because only six stories fit in the wood rail, the story at the bottom of the rail is pushed off the page entirely every time we bump the wood. This week we hade three days — Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — where we had so many wood bumps throughout the day that by the time we went home, the morning wood had been knocked off the page.

I’m writing this column on Friday evening. When I came into the office this morning, the 6 a.m. wood was a story by Buffy Pollock about the opening of The Restaurant at Jacksonville Inn. Three months ago, Buffy wrote a story announcing that the restaurant would be moving into the historic Jacksonville Inn in June. That story set a record for the most page-views on our site at the time, so we figured people would want to know the restaurant was now open. As I type this paragraph, it’s the bottom story on the wood rail. The next wood bump will push it from the front of the website.

“All wood is good wood,” we say in the newsroom. But sometimes the wood has a short life, because the news just never stops. 

— David Smigelski, Rogue Valley Times editor