When my friend Suzanne Stefanac first told me where she was going to work, to say I was horrified would not be putting too fine a point on it.

A show about technology that’s part of a joint venture with Microsoft, the Genghis Kahn of the personal computer industry …

NBC, the world’s largest news organization …

and Softbank, which last time I checked owns just about everything else.

I thought she was walking into the lion’s jaws.

Well, she was. And now, so am I.

The reason I’m here today is because I am committed to doing good consumer journalism–and most importantly, because I believe that everyone on this staff, TV and Web, is committed to that goal as well.

And in that way, I consider The Site–both the television show and the web site–to be a grand experiment.

It is almost impossible to look at the media world today and not find a potential conflict of interest.

Any media company of any scale seems to some deal going with every other company. They’ve even started to invest in software.

And now that computers have become consumer devices–well, at least they’re trying to be–technology companies are large, important advertisers.

Independence in the financial sense is almost impossible to find if you want to reach a critical mass audience.

So what we’re doing here is kind of the ultimate spooky thing for someone like me who is sensitive and very concerned about these kinds of conflicts.

But I truly believe that if we care about the world that we are creating, we have to face these kinds of issues without flinching.

We have to disclose financial conflicts and we have to be rigorous about doing the hard stories.

I, for one, certainly have no intention of shying away from talking tough about issues or products or alliances, no matter who is involved.

Because if we do shy away from them, we lose our credibility. Then no one watches the show or visits the Web site, and then all the good, hard work that has gone into making this happen will be wasted.

I don’t believe for a minute that this will happen, so I am incredibly excited about walking into the jaws of this particular lion.

We have an opportunity here to help educate the world about the power of computing technology, what it’s good for and what it can’t do. We can help them understand critical issues about technology’s relationship to culture, to government, to commerce, to ourselves.

It’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s definitely within our grasp.

I’ve been working on my own for a couple of years now, waiting for the right opportunity to come along — the one that would let me do the kind of work that I think is important, with the kinds of people that I want to be associated with.

Many of those people are here. And I have great hopes for our success. Wish us luck!