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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.

I’m proud to say that mb’s Media MVP of the year attended Northwestern University (located in my home town and my current grad school.) See what Dylan Stableford thinks was so great about Steven Colbert in 2006.

The votes are in for what was a predictably wild and wooly media year. To cap it off, mb will be unveiling the winners (and losers) of mediabistro.com’s first-ever year-end media awards all week. Today’s awards: Media Story of the Year:

It’s hard to imagine a media story bigger in 2006 than YouTube’s $1.65 billion sale to Google. But the sale was really only another part of the Web video juggernaut’s folklore. The first full year of YouTube’s existence saw founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen hobnobbing with media moguls in Sun Valley while its users were uploading some of the year’s biggest media moments to YouTube for the world to consume, turning YouTube into the closest thing the planet has ever had to a global channel.

Read more about the big winner here.

The O.J. Simpson Book Debacle Made Everything Else Pale, And America Sick. Read the gory details here.

Two interesting articles that seem to capture some of what’s new, good, bad and weird in literature.
What’s a bibliography doing in a novel? Love it or hate it? An exploration here in the Times. In my day job, I work for a scientific journal and on a related tangent, it’s not uncommon for authors to be asked to provide permission from the people they acknowledge in their papers. I wonder how this would work for fiction.
And Paul collins at Slate investigates whether Google Book Search is going to bust wide open previously secret plagiarists.

Big ups to Brian at mb’s very own TVNewser, who had a very cool piece written about him in the Times today. It also sheds a little light on the frantic life of a professional blogger–it’s not all sitting around in your pajamas instant-messaging with your pals.
Also at the Times is a piece on Good Housekeeping‘s upcoming changes to the publication. Those of you who pitch to it (or are planning on it) should take note.

If you’re working on a YA book, you might want to check with your editor about his or her thoughts on your level of sexual content and language. While Borders won’t give a specific reason, they’re refusing to carry Aury Wallington’s (who has contributed YA advice here) book Pop! (writes Jessa Crispin in The Book Standard.) It’s disappointing that there are some groups trying to water down YA fiction, as said YA’s are the readers most in need of honesty in their writing. Catch a YA reader now with a great book and they’ll be a reader for life. Talking down to them with whitewashed writing is no way to get kids interested in literature.

Assistant Managing Editor Richard L. Berke answers reader questions including why the Times feels the need to have so many durn blogs.
Good news for webcomic writers out there: there is a publisher that may be interested in you and only you.

mb asked some friends in the media to give us recollections of September 11, 2001. Some declined, saying they felt uncomfortable or that it was too self-indulgent. Others gave personal accounts – from Brooklyn to Bombay – of the day no one will ever forget.

Dylan Stableford speaks with University of Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Journalism Dean David M. Rubin on the awards, the state of journalism, and how blogs and journalism scandals have affected the way the school teaches media:

mediabistro.com: What are your thoughts on the state of the media, 2006? What encourages you?
Rubin: There is such a wide array of media sources available, more so than any other time in history. If you want to be an informed person, you can do it with a computer and a broadband connection. And that’s encouraging, because it breaks the monopoly of information. Another very encouraging sign is that we are seeing the reconsideration of big media, the bigness of big media — such as Time Warner’s synergies, whether it really pays off. It’s different from a decade ago.

mediabistro.com: What discourages you?
Rubin: I’m distressed by Wall Street’s pressure [on media companies] to perform at financial levels and over shorter and shorter periods of time that are just untenable. It’s the kind of pressure that leads Knight Ridder to sell its newspapers, and I’m not sure that we’re better off.

More here.