From the editor’s desk: A look at what readers are reading

Published 2:34 pm Friday, March 31, 2023

For an editor used to spending his days swimming in words, I sure have been finding myself surfing a sea of numbers lately.

And I’ve learned a few things.

For instance, a ton of Rogue Valley Times readers love reading the daily jail logs.

High school sports generate more interaction among readers than just about any other topic.

And stories about new restaurants and other local businesses gather lots of eyeballs.

A story written by RV Times reporter Buffy Pollock last Friday about a new restaurant opening inside the Jacksonville Inn set a new record for the Rogue Valley Times with 6,026 pageviews as of Thursday.

A March 23 story by RV Times reporter Morgan Rothborne about five new businesses opening in downtown Medford also captured readers’ attention, surging to the top of the trending stories monitor for several days.

Before the news of the Jacksonville Inn restaurant, the story that had garnered the most traffic since we started publishing was “Neighbor War,” a story by writer Damian Mann about a feud between County Surveyor Scott Fein and his neighbor Scott Ford, which led to code violations against Fein, a stalking order against Ford and a lot of bad blood.

It made sense to us that an investigative piece about an elected official acting questionably would be our most-read story, but we also weren’t surprised that news of a new restaurant passed it up, because it’s the kind of story that affects people directly.

We’ve seen it before, many times. We get emails regularly asking us to check on the status of the slow-in-coming Panera Bread restaurant on Highway 99 at Garfield. Remember how crazy Medfordites got over the opening of In-N-Out and Chick-fil-A, and the closing of McGrath’s? A short story we wrote March 21 about the Medford Cracker Barrel restaurant being the last one in the state spurred a lively debate online.  

Tracking the habits and preferences of readers is endlessly fascinating.

The jail log is consistently in the top 5 most-viewed items on our website. In the past week, the logs were viewed 8,614 times. 

High school sports is another hot spot for readers. In the past week, local sports stories drew 7,265 views, and for the month of March, local sports coverage attracted 29,240 views.

In addition to generating a lot of traffic on our website, high school sports leads the way when it comes to engagement on our social media channels such as Facebook, with local sports fans sharing our stories and commenting on them with impressive regularity.

What does it all mean?

For one thing, it means we have to cast our lines in many different directions, because people have diverse interests and reading habits. It means we have to meet people where they live, not just writing stories about the big things like homelessness, affordable housing and the actions of our elected officials. People want to know what local kids are doing, where they can grab a bite to eat, what movies and plays are opening.

All of it creates a marketplace of ideas and information where people not only come to read and learn about what’s happening in the Rogue Valley, but also to comment, add their insights and spur conversation.

The numbers we swim through bear that out. We passed 1 million pageviews Monday, and all of the indicators we watch surged as well, including the number of individuals who visited rv-times.com (41,536, a 42.94% increase over last week); and the number of people who follow our Facebook page (1,546, up 6.40% over last week).

Let us know what topics you want to know about by emailing community@rv-times.com.

— David Smigelski, editor