Happy New Year, every­one! We’ve invited some friends over for a wild night of board games while the kids watch videos.

A bit­ter­sweet end of an era arrived today for those of us who recall the salad days of the Cyber­Wire Dis­patch, a peri­odic no-holds-barred, occa­sion­ally gonzo-journalism-style email mis­sive that took aim at the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and cor­po­rate pow­ers that be. The muck­rak­ing CWD reached its zenith in the mid– to late ‘90s, accu­mu­lat­ing a read­er­ship in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. The writer (a friend), Brock Meeks, a vet­eran inves­tiga­tive reporter who now works at MSNBC, dis­patched his last Cyber­Wire today. The CWD web­site hasn’t pub­lished any dis­patches since 1998, so I’ll pub­lish its swan song below.

Copy­right © 2003 // Cyber­Wire Dis­patch // Decem­ber 31, 2003

Jack­ing in from “Fond Farewell” Port:

WASHINGTON-New York’s Times Square today looks and feels like the war rav­aged cap­i­tal of some third world coun­try after a coup d’état; the FBI is telling local cops to be leery of any hinky act­ing, middle-eastern look­ing males that hap­pen to be carry around dog-eared almanacs (no, I’m not mak­ing this stuff up); the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment, with Con­gress act­ing as unin­dicted co-conspirators, have pen­cil whipped the Bill of Rights so as to make it unrec­og­niz­able to the Found­ing Fathers; Paris Hilton’s sex tape is all over the Inter­net and Cyber­Wire Dis­patch is clos­ing the doors on its publication.

Thank God for Paris, at least some san­ity remains out there.

Con­tinue reading »

The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor serves up the most inter­est­ing web­sites of 2003.

And for the ulti­mate aggre­ga­tion of 2003 lists, Fimoculous.com has gath­ered more than 300 year-enders into 23 cat­e­gories and placed them all on a sin­gle page. Entries include:

• Inde­pen­dent Press Awards from Utne Reader

• The P.U.-Litzer Prizes for 2003 from AlterNet.org

• Dave Barry’s Year in Review

• 25 Cen­sored Media Sto­ries from Project Cen­sored (as usual, they really mean “under­played” rather than censored)

• Yahoo’s Top Searches of 2003

• Six coolest inven­tions of 2003 from Time.

But where’s the year-end Zeit­geist from Google, like last year?

Pen­guin Group USA has a Q&A with the pro­foundly wise Ken Auletta, author of the new book Back­story: Inside the Busi­ness of News. He says, “Increas­ingly, jour­nal­is­tic divi­sions are part of giant com­pa­nies who demand profit mar­gins … that often war with good jour­nal­ism.” He’s right.

Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointer.

Glenn F. looks back at the high­lights of 2003 and offers some pre­dic­tions for the new year in his Wi-Fi Net­work­ing News blog, which I’ve finally blogrolled (under Tech) at the left. “What will 2004 bring? More secu­rity, higher cell data rates, and the final blos­som­ing of hotspots in pub­lic spaces.”

Paul Boutin offers 101 ways to save the Inter­net in the Jan­u­ary 2004 issue of Wired magazine.

Wired News offers a review of satel­lite radio ser­vices and con­cludes, when it comes to vari­ety and sound qual­ity, Sir­ius and XM deliver the goods. Once you’ve heard it, you might never lis­ten to FM or AM radio again.

Susan also reports on Blog­Pulse, a site (still in beta) that mines the data from 93,000 weblogs for phrases and per­son names, then presents the infor­ma­tion via a blog site and XML feeds. No search func­tion, though, so fairly lim­ited use­ful­ness, as far as I can see.

Susan Mer­nit points to Greg Elin’s Duh Blog point­ing to a Dec. 21 New York Times inter­ac­tive fea­ture called When Work­ers Die as a ster­ling exam­ple of dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling. Except, nine days later, when you click on it you get an Abstract story page that states:

Please Note: Archive arti­cles do not include pho­tos, charts or graphics.

So this means that all New York Times mul­ti­me­dia fea­tures dis­ap­pear into the ether?

From Jeff Jarvis yes­ter­day via Lost Remote: AOL sends out a press release tout­ing what it calls “involve­ment jour­nal­ism.” But, so far at least, there’s lit­tle evi­dence of it on AOL.