We are in the business of bringing you the news and information that allow you to make informed business decisions. Our focus is to provide you with editorial content that keeps you coming back month after month. It is our relationship, or bond, with you - our reader - that is the reason Heavy Duty Trucking magazine exists.

We have entered an age where some magazines are beginning to blur the lines between advertising and editorial content. Brands and product placement deals are being interwoven into movie and TV show plots. And the same is also happening in some industry magazines.

Not here. Despite increased economic pressure and diminishing advertising revenues throughout all magazine publishing markets, Heavy Duty Trucking will continue to maintain its integrity to supply unbiased news and information to you. You can trust that we are providing you with information that is not influenced by advertising interests.

Recently, one of my fellow publishers, Mike Osenga, publisher and president of Diesel Progress, wrote about this same topic. We were so impressed with his point of view, we asked if we could share some of his comments with our readers, which he agreed to wholeheartedly.

"I'm honored," Osenga said. "We have beaucoup respect for HDT's editorial. Anything that advances good editorial content is OK fine with me."

In his editorial, Osenga pointed out to his readers that a group vice president of a "media group" haughtily told him that if an article couldn't go in three to five of his magazines, it was worthless to him. "It's just filler between the ads."

We are amazed at publishers who put so little stock in their editorial content. HDT delivers the highest level of editorial produced by the most respected journalists in our field, because that's what our readers expect and deserve from us..

Heavy Duty Trucking continues to provide comprehensive coverage of issues and trends that impact your business daily - topics that are difficult to research and require years of expertise on the part of our editors to produce. Providing our quality of editorial content is expensive but worth the cost.

We will not buckle under increasing economic pressure to compromise our editorial integrity in hopes of increasing advertising revenue - just because other magazines in our industry are.

"The news should not be for sale to the highest bidder," said Gary Ruskin, executive director for Commercial Alert, an organization that fights what its members consider to be the creeping commercialization of American culture.

Crossing the line is not good for you - you will no longer trust us and we'll lose you as a loyal reader. Crossing the line is not good for advertisers - when editorial content loses credibility with the reader, it impacts the credibility of the advertisers as well., and we want our advertisers to be successful

Thank you for reading Heavy Duty Trucking. We appreciate your loyalty. We will continue to uphold the integrity of American journalism by providing information that is independent of advertising interests - information that has become even more important in this time of economic crisis.

E-mail Kate Miller at kmiller@truckinginfo.com, or write P.O. Box W, Newport Beach, CA 92658.