(FORTUNE Magazine) – As business journalists, we always begin a new year wondering what's likely to be the story of the year, the seminal subject that seizes our attention and makes us rethink everything. Sometimes it's a combination of assets on a grand scale, say RJR Nabisco in 1988, valued at the then-unthinkable sum of $25 billion, a record that lasted a decade. Other times it may be the rise of a phenomenon--e-commerce comes to mind--that profoundly alters the business landscape. Last year's most important story? Probably the U.S. v. Microsoft.

Well, we hate to jump to conclusions, but it's possible that this year's biggest business story arrived ten days into the new century: the marriage of media behemoth Time Warner and Internet upstart AOL, which would create a company with a market cap initially north of $350 billion. Wow! Now that's a story. And one that FORTUNE should be all over, since it's at the white-hot center of the subjects we care most about: the progress of the digital revolution, the battle to dominate e-commerce, the extreme valuations of today's stock market--all leading to ever more grandiose mergers of the mighty and to the tensions and corporate intrigue you'd expect from such heady combinations.

The story, of course, is just getting under way. Competitors of both AOL and Time Warner will no doubt respond with their own mergers and strategic alliances; the new entity may expand even further; government intervention can't be ruled out; and only the most naive would expect such an enterprise to move ahead without spilling some high-ranking executive blood.

In this issue, our first since the proposed purchase of Time Warner was announced, we focus on what we think the real competitive landscape looks like now. That's why Steve Case and Bill Gates are on our cover, two faces you've seen there before. We believe each is driven by a passion to get to the top of the same digital hill first. Each has different plans for getting there. And while there may actually be room for both, neither man seems capable of acting as if that's so.

Before you turn to our coverage, though, we want to confront head-on a question that's much on some people's minds these days: How can we, and the other Time Warner journalistic properties merging with AOL, assure both our reading public and those in the business community we cover that we will continue to do our jobs in an unbiased, unfettered manner? In other words, can we really play it straight and avoid carrying water for our corporate owners? The simple answer is that we have, and we will.

In this era, diversified media conglomerates are a reality, and even so-called independent media companies have all sorts of commercial alliances. For a light but all-too-true look at just how far these entanglements can extend, see Michael Kinsley's witty essay in the Jan. 24 issue of our sister publication Time (also available at www.time.com). These are facts of life. And they are facts that we at Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner, have been living with at least since the merger of Time and Warner ten years ago. Review our coverage over that period (some of which is shown below) and you'll find stories in this magazine questioning the wisdom of CEO Gerald Levin's commitment to cable (looks as if we were wrong) or highlighting the dominance of CNBC, the GE-owned cable network, over Time Warner's CNNfn. We have praised Disney (until things turned sour) and made fun of our vice chairman, Ted Turner. Our colleagues at Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and other titles have also reported fairly and controversially on our corporate cousins and their competitors, panning Warner Brothers films or most recently outing the xenophobic pitcher of the Time Warner-owned Atlanta Braves. We could name at least one other global media company that would've fired every editor here a long time ago for displaying such independence.

One comfort we take at Time Inc. is that we are designed to avoid corporate interference with our journalism. The editor of this magazine reports directly to the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., who has a written mandate from the board of directors "to provide unbiased coverage of the myriad interests of advertisers and of Time Warner itself." But while the safeguards of our "church-state" system help assure our journalists that they are free to operate as they should, in the end it all comes down to the integrity of the individuals within the organization. As managers and editors, we pledge to continue calling them as we see them--at times criticizing Time Warner and AOL and praising their competitors, at times doing the opposite--without altering our writers' findings or engaging in self-censorship.

This isn't just a matter of journalistic idealism. If we lose your trust--and the trust of our employees--we're out of business. If we cross the line, we have no doubt what will happen. The journalists we're proud to employ--not least the prize-winning contributors to our current package, Carol Loomis, Joe Nocera, Marc Gunther, and David Kirkpatrick--are independent-minded professionals of such stature and employability that each would politely (or not so politely) decline to do our bidding, walk out the door to the next job, and post the truth somewhere on the Internet that afternoon. That's the way the world works today, and, frankly, we're glad of it.

So sit back and rest assured that nothing is about to happen to this magazine's first-class business journalism--except that we have a great new landscape to cover. This is our story. We've been digging away at it early and often. And we are sticking to it.