Our mission starts with our name, the Rogue Valley Tribune. We are a new news operation with plans to cover the Rogue Valley like a blanket of February fog.

Big picture: We expect to be the most authoritative news source from the Rogue River to Mount Shasta and from the Cascade crest to the Southern Oregon Coast.

Full disclosure from the Department of Don’t Over-Promise: We can’t do a comprehensive job of covering an area that large right out of the gate, and we know it. So, we’re going to start where we’re based — Medford — and radiate outward to Central Point, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Talent, Eagle Point and other communities of the Rogue River and Bear Creek valleys.

We’ll reach into the Applegate, Prospect, Butte Falls and the communities of the upper Rogue. And we’ll work with our friendly competitors and colleagues at Ashland.News to cover the home of Southern Oregon University and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

We will strive to be a mirror of the community, telling your stories and helping all of us make sense of it.

We will be a digital news operation first and foremost. We will cover stories fast, as they happen, and promptly get them up on our site, rvtrib.com, seven days a week.

We’ll share those stories through every social media channel at our disposal to make sure you get the news as it breaks. The beauty of social media is that it allows readers to share stories at the speed of light with their friends and family, and allows people to provide instant feedback that adds to the depth and reach of the stories. Anybody who lived through the Almeda fire knows how important it is to communicate with each other quickly and not depend on others to save us.

Along with a fresh, constantly updated website, we will publish a printed newspaper on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays with stories that have been posted to our news site over the preceding few days. The paper will be printed in Klamath Falls and mailed to subscribers. A newsletter version of the paper will hit your email inbox by 5 a.m., and the printed paper will hit your mailbox when the mail carrier arrives.

We’ll have the traditional things subscribers say they want: Comics, puzzles, local sports, letters to the editor, outdoors coverage, as well as world and national news. If you see holes in this plan, drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do to adjust.

The website will have all of the arts, music and entertainment listings you need to plan your social life, along with restaurant reviews, theater coverage, movies and more.

We’ll also publish a weekly arts and entertainment section called Go! Rogue that will keep you current on happenings around the region, along with TV listings for the week.

The operation will be staffed with seasoned journalists — some familiar names, some new ones. We will start with 14 people in the newsroom and 38 people overall. We will launch as the largest news team in Jackson County.

The website and paper will also flex their muscles with a robust mix of stories from around the state, because our company, EO Media Group, is a homegrown, family-owned company with established newspapers across Oregon — from Medford to Astoria, out to the Wallowas and across to Bend.

But our sweet spot is the Rogue Valley.

Our first home will be inside one of the most distinctive buildings in Medford, the 1947 JC Penney building at the corner of Sixth and Central, in the heart of the Medford Downtown Historic District. We’ll be in part of the space formerly occupied by KidTime Children’s Museum before they remodeled the old Carnegie Library.

The building is best known as the home of the Southern Oregon Historical Society library, and we’re going to be their housemates.

If you have paid attention to the travails of newspapers across the U.S. in recent years, you probably realize that something special is happening here. Newspapers are going under by the week, but here in Medford we’re going the other way.

Maybe we’ll match our new office location by going down in history as the company that saved the Rogue Valley from being a news desert.

Reach Rogue Valley Tribune editor David Smigelski at dsmigelski@rvtrib.com.