What began with the extraordinary jolt to traditional thinking of the £86bn America Online takeover of Time Warner ended on a surreal note with the foulmouthed soft-porn baron buying the already crumbling Daily Express. A Christmas panto of a deal with everything but a fairy godmother for the hapless hacks.
It was also in many ways a satisfyingly circular year. The AOL/Time Warner deal announced in the first week of 2000 finally gained approval from regulators at the end of the year.
The prospect of a single company owning ITV began in earnest when Granada forced the issue in January - becoming a real possibility when the communications white paper, published last week, removed the last legal obstacles to single ownership.
Websites were launched, including financial news site thestreet.co.uk in January, and websites closed - thestreet.co.uk went under last month. The year began with an offer for EMI by Warner Music and ended with another from Bertelsmann.
The search for an ITV chief executive rumbled on for the entire year and has yet to be resolved; Mirror editor Piers Morgan meanwhile is still in situ against the odds.
For most it was a year which started with both intense ambition and the feeling that the industry was on the cusp of a period of big change.
Rupert Murdoch took fright and announced the formation of Sky Global Networks, the merger of his satellite businesses to build a worldwide platform for internet access. In June, the French media conglomerate Vivendi announced a deal to acquire the Universal music and movie businesses from Seagram to provide content for its TV and mobile phone businesses.
The world didn't turn upside down for long, however. The ever-fickle stock markets started getting jittery in March and internet became a dirty word. In February, Reuters announced plans to spend £500m and saw its shares rise 23%. A month later, Emap said it would invest £250m in the internet and its shares slid 12%. The rest of the year was spent in retrenchment. Emap decided it would spend just £120m over the next three years while last week United News & Media said it would be cutting its spend on new media in half next year to £60m.
Britain's biggest internet business, Freeserve, will end up in foreign hands by year's end after a torrid 12 months. To suggest, though, that the faith in new technology which fired the early optimism has been abandoned would be churlish. Some of the underlying changes thunder on, such as the rapid take-up of digital TV with all its possibilities of interactive services. Significantly too, Bertelsmann, which owns the BMG music business, made peace with the rogue internet music website Napster.
But probably the most signficant domestic event was the wrestling over control of ITV. Granada kept everyone guessing for the first half of the year, demerging from its hotels business in May. By July, Carlton and United News & Media's plans to merge had collapsed and Granada became the dominant force by taking United's ITV franchises for £1.75bn.
If Granada's Charles Allen was perhaps the winner of the year, Lord Hollick, whose strategy fell apart before his eyes, was the loser - an accusation that he would vehemently deny.
Of those signing off (at least for now) were Elisabeth Murdoch, who quit the family firm, Tony Illsley who walked away from Telewest with £6m, and David Elstein from Channel 5. Border Television was acquired by Capital Radio, and Saatchi & Saatchi, the symbol of 1980s hubris, was bought by Publicis. Births included RTL, a pan-European TV and radio business formed from the merger of CLT ufa and the TV interests of Pearson. Marjorie Scardino at Pearson continues to impress the City.
As the year draws to a close, share prices are still struggling to find form and there have been worrying signs of a softer advertising market. News Corp recently imposed a company-wide freeze on hiring and said it was "tightening the screws" in anticipation of tougher times.
Key moments in 2001 will be the expected flotations of ITN, ONdigital and Sky Global Networks, but the communications white paper published last week is also likely to spark a new round of corporate activity. In many ways the biggest let-down of the year, the white paper, merely put the key cross-media ownership rules out for further consultation. As the ITV companies have demonstrated before, it doesn't do to wait until the rules are spelled out. The year's most disappointing document may lead to some excitement at the start of 2001.
Oh, and a seasonal message to Rosie Boycott at the Express: "He's behind you."
