This week's issue marks the departure of Greg Lupion, executive editor of EE Times. You may not know his name, but you have seen the fruits of Greg's extraordinary work: He held together our editorial and art departments, executed well-organized art and story layouts and managed the careful copy editing that has been the hallmark of this newspaper.

Quality control is not a glamorous function; by extension, it demands an even-keeled and uncompromising leader. Greg is the quintessential QC manager.

His departure results from EE Times' growing emphasis on Web operations. It's a shift that's playing out not just at this publication, but in newsrooms across the globe.

In an article titled "Goodbye to Newspapers?" published this month in The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker calls the Internet an electronic version of the "boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device." He pays the Net its due as "an invaluable resource for research and fact checking" that gives reporters "nearly immediate access to material that once required lengthy and often futile searches in the paper's 'morgue.' "

But Baker also argues that "how the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will." He cites an observation by John S. Carroll, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, that "80 percent of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers, and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily." Corporations like Google and Yahoo appear disinclined to invest in costly news-gathering operations.

What does that mean for us--the staff and readers of EE Times? It means the staff must say goodbye to treasured and seasoned colleagues like Greg Lupion, and yet still turn out a steady flow of rigorously researched, well-written reports and analyses, whether they appear first in print or online. That's what you expect us to do.

Certainly, the immediacy of online news, blogs, user-generated content and a robust reader community add new dimensions to EETimes.com and our sister Web site, TechOnline.com. While we relish the new outlets, we dare not compromise our reporting.

News must be reported by professionals if consumers are to trust it. Trustworthiness is the standard, and week in and week out, Greg has been the standard bearer for EE Times. We promise to uphold it.