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.