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On Tuesday, 6,880 people visited the Rogue Valley Times website, where they viewed 31,452 pages. On average, each visitor clicked on 4.5 articles and spent a little over 2 minutes reading.

As our reporters, editors and photographers gathered in the newsroom Wednesday morning for our daily staff meeting, the stories getting the most attention at that moment were the opening of Panera Bread, a new drug treatment program in Medford, and the arrest of two employees from Stabbin’ Wagon, a local harm reduction program that has generated controversy locally.

In the previous 24 hours, the stories that generated the most attention were the Stabbin’ Wagon piece, the reopening of the Village Bookstore at a new location in Medford, and a report about postal workers protesting plans to potentially move some of their local jobs to Portland as part of a U.S. Postal Service realignment effort. The story getting the most love on social media — shares, likes, comments, etc. — was the Panera opening.

We know all of this because we begin our daily staff meetings with a report from our audience engagement editor, Julia Moore. She provides a rundown of what RV Times readers are doing online. She tells us the stories that are trending, which stories generated the most readership in the previous 24 hours, along with a recap of how many people visited the site, how many articles they read, how much time they spent on the website, and which stories generated the most engagement on social media.

The report often leads to deeper discussion about what the numbers mean as well as help us decide what stories deserve more resources and where to place them in the print paper. Our research tools allow us to drill down deeper to see how many readers are new to the site, along with other categories based on how often people visit and how they found us, whether through a Google search, a link from Facebook or maybe a news app such as NewsBreak.

Julia is part of a three-person audience engagement team at EO Media that started in February. The other members are Michelle Maxwell, former editor of the Eugene Register-Guard, and Susan Forrester Rana, one of the owners of EO Media, who runs the company’s audience engagement efforts.

Julia is based in Medford, but she and her team work together to understand the traffic and readership habits at all of EO Media’s papers in Oregon and Washington. The goal is to increase our audience by helping us build trust and loyalty with readers so people will subscribe and support our news-gathering efforts.

Julia started her journalism career as a photographer at the Mail Tribune, where she was hired in 2010 by longtime photo editor Bob Pennell. She came to Medford with a photojournalism degree from the University of Montana in Missoula. It didn’t take Pennell long to realize that Julia had skills and intelligence that extended beyond the photo lab, and he encouraged the managers at the Mail Tribune to expand her responsibilities.

Julia became a member of the Mail Tribune web team, and at one point left the paper to become the digital media manager at KDRV-TV in Medford, where she oversaw the station’s website and social media sites. After two and a half years, she returned to the Mail Tribune as social media strategist. When the Mail Tribune folded and EO Media launched the Rogue Valley Times, she was one of our first hires to the company’s new audience engagement team.

“We try to familiarize people (at the EO papers) with analytics and how they can incorporate that into their day,” Julia says. “It’s about understanding what our readers care about and meeting them where they’re at.”

— David Smigelski, Rogue Valley Times editor