The new Rogue Valley Times sign at 2 E. Main St. in downtown Medford.

While no one day in the Rogue Valley Times newsroom is the same as the next, there is something of a routine.

People start to arrive to work from Talent, Medford, Grants Pass and other Rogue Valley cities, and we begin every morning at 9:15 a.m. The coffee is always brewing in our quite-nice breakroom that overlooks Front Street in downtown Medford.

The morning meeting in the newsroom is our chance to go over stories that people might file that day, from court cases covered by crime and courts reporter Kevin Opsahl to Go! Rogue stories written by features and general assignment reporter James Sloan. Throw in a news story or feature by reporter Buffy Pollock, an outdoors story by reporter Shaun Hall, or something that our Swiss Army knife reporter, Nick Morgan, pulls out of his hat or finds out about from an email or searching Google alerts or local news content online.

We use a “weekbook” spreadsheet during the meeting, which the editor mainly manages — it’s a color-coded beast that some staff members to this day scratch their heads over. But it works because we have intermittent and hard deadlines for filing stories throughout the day — we always want to publish new local or state content to our website to keep it fresh.

The stories are entered into the weekbook during the meeting, and the meeting also includes talk of what’s going on with families, plans for vacations or weekend getaways, personal stuff that matters when you work with people day after day and you form strong bonds.

City Editor Erick Bengel then begins the task of waiting until stories are filed, and then he goes over each sentence with a fine-toothed comb: rewriting anything that is clunky, sometimes fixing a typo (they happen, believe us) and preparing 1st-read stories for reporters to re-examine so they can see how he edits them. It’s an effort on our part to help reporters develop and improve their writing with each story.

Some stories are placed a day or two out if we still need to get photos from our staff photographers Jamie Lusch and Andy Atkinson.

Throughout all of this, we’re gathering filed stories — sent to us via email — from our stable of freelancers and lifestyle columnists to use online and in print.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the editor and Go! Rogue and Features Editor Alissa Corman proof all the pages that will appear in our print edition the next day, mixing that in with daily editing and web-posting duties. Alissa also manages the Go! Rogue section each week, editing stories and photo captions and producing a blueprint for each edition that designers follow to make the section shine every Thursday in print.

(Note: Any listing you’ve ever seen in Go! Rogue or in the RVT print edition has Alissa’s fingerprints all over it. It’s a massive task to try to keep up with every submitting group’s event, or every band playing at this or that venue, and she does it consistently well.)

For the print product that you hold in your hands several days each week, content is chosen by the editor and Opinion Editor Robert Galvin, and pages are designed by a team of remote EO Media Group paginators from across the Northwest — one lives in Medford, but we have others in Bend and even Washington state.

Also, we’re posting to social media all day, which helps us put our stories and photos into the hands of loyal or new users.

Rob Galvin, who also is the Times’ “Thinking Out Loud” weekly columnist, is always working on something — writing editorials or his column, scoping out Opinion commentary or editorials from around our EO Media Group sites that might be of interest to our readers, or covering the Saturday editor’s shift. 

But it’s not all work.

Throughout the day on weekdays, staffers take a well-deserved break from their work and walk en masse down to local coffee shops. Meanwhile, people either catch lunch while out on assignment, or they gather in our breakroom to eat, chit-chat or just take a breather before the afternoon sprint to the day’s final deadline begins.

By about 3 or 4 p.m., much of what Times readers have viewed on our website or app is already up or is scheduled to publish based on a timestamp. Late stories are edited sometimes up until 5 or 6 p.m. for that night or carried over to the next day.

I’ve written about this before in an editor’s column, but by the time the newsroom clears out for the day, the sports show with Sports Editor Kris Henry and reporter Joe Zochert is already in full swing. Their stories will usually appear later at night, most often accompanied by Andy Aktinson’s photos.

It’s always a good, long day, and we accomplish a lot for a small staff.

Then we come back the next day and do it all over again.

— Troy Heie, editor