The magazine has put a mirror on the cover of its "Person of the Year" issue, released on Monday, "because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the information age," Editor Richard Stengel said in a statement.

You beat out candidates including Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and James Baker, the former U.S. Secretary of State who led Washington's bipartisan
Iraq Study Group.

Time has been naming its person of the year since 1927 and the tradition has become the source of speculation every year, as well as controversy over unpopular choices such as Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.

The aim is to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse."

Grossman said the creators and consumers of user-generated Internet sites showed a community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.

"It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes," said Grossman, Time's technology writer and book critic.

"The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web," he said. "It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter."

MySpace -- bought by media giant News Corp. (NYSE:NWSA - news) last year for $580 million -- has more than 130 million users around the world and adds around 300,000 members a day, while YouTube -- bought by Internet search leader Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) last month for $1.65 billion -- gets about 100 million daily views.

"These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media," Stengel said.

"Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they'd never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian," he said.

Time's 2005 Person of the Year was the richest man in the world,Bill Gates, his wife Melinda, and Irish rocker Bono for being Good Samaritans, while the 2004 choice was
President Bush. In 2003 "The American Soldier" graced the cover in a year when U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

Ms Friedman offered no reason for the announcement, but Ms Regan's firing comes less than a month after Mr Murdoch's cancellation of Simpson's hypothetical murder confession If I Did It, a planned book and Fox television interview that was said to describe how Simpson hypothetically would have killed ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. He was acquitted of murder in 1995.

When the project was announced last month it was greeted with instant and near-universal disgust. A dozen local Fox affiliates announced they wanted nothing to do with the television interviews, and the families of the murder victims urged a boycott of the broadcast and the book, which they described as "disgusting" and "despicable".

Mr Murdoch personally pulled the plug after his organisation was accused of exploiting the notorious double murders. News Corp finally put out a brief statement offering a rare personal apology for the lapse in judgment. "I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project," Mr Murdoch was quoted as saying. "We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson."

Subsequently, the victims' families accused the Murdoch empire of trying to buy their silence. Nicole brown Simpson's sister, Denise Brown, told a TV interviewer that she and others had been approached by a company representative before the cancellation, and essentially asked how much it would take to keep them happy.

"They wanted to offer us millions of dollars," she said, "for, like, 'oh I'm sorry' money. But they were still going to air the show." The family turned the offer down flat. A News Corp spokesman acknowledged negotiations over money had taken place with both families, but insisted there were "no strings attached".

Ms Regan, an industry force since the 1980s, when she produced best-sellers by Drew Barrymore and Kathie Lee Gifford for Simon & Schuster, has been labelled a "foul-mouthed tyrant" and the "enfant terrible of American publishing." She is also widely envied - if not admired - for her gift of attracting attention to her books and to herself.

Since 1994, she has headed the ReganBooks imprint at HarperCollins, an ideal fit for Mr Murdoch's tabloid tastes. Ms Regan has published a long list of racy best-sellers, including baseball star Jose Canseco's tell-all Juiced and Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, and is the rare publisher of interest to gossip columnists, notably for a rumoured affair with former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

She often clashed with her more temperate peers and is widely believed to have had tense relations with Ms Friedman. Last year, Ms Regan moved her offices to Los Angeles, further distancing herself from corporate officials in New York.

Ms Regan has often complained that her more literary side has been overlooked, pointing out that she has published books by the critically acclaimed Wally Lamb, Douglas Generation X Coupland and novelist Jess Walter, whose The Zero was a finalist for the National Book Award in November. The Simpson project, announced the day before the awards ceremony, quickly overshadowed the nomination.

Mr Walter said he was "flabbergasted" by her firing. "The Judith I knew was nothing like the tabloid headlines," he said. "Judith has always been a good friend and one of the few people who never lied to me. Having dealt with publishing and Hollywood, I can't say that about everyone."

"And then Jane called Rupert and Rupert said he won't tolerate that kind of behavior," said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Despite the success Ms. Regan brought Mr. Murdoch's publishing business since he established her imprint in 1994, their relationship had soured in recent weeks as she became involved in a controversy involving the Simpson book and companion television special she had championed.

After some Fox affiliates declined to broadcast the special, the company pulled the project, which featured Mr. Simpson hypothesizing about how he would have murdered his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman.

"You don't do this in a perfect world because she makes a lot of money," the person said of Ms. Regan's dismissal, adding that Mr. Murdoch did not put the blame for the Simpson controversy solely on Ms. Regan.

Several efforts to reach Ms. Regan since her dismissal, including new attempts since the accusations of anti-Semitism surfaced, were unsuccessful.

A News Corporation spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Murdoch, who had also approved the Simpson project, has not spoken to Ms. Regan since before the imbroglio it provoked but authorized Ms. Friedman to dismiss her, saying her slurs were the final straw after other recent episodes of what were deemed improper behavior, according to one of the people familiar with the News Corporation's account.

Ms. Regan's previous successes at the company seemed in sync with Mr. Murdoch's penchant for pushing the boundaries of public taste and shaking up the media establishment.

The conversation with Mr. Jackson on Friday afternoon was described by sources as heated and confrontational, even for the famously forceful Ms. Regan. Ms. Regan's alleged comments, which came in the midst of a tense conversation in which she berated Mr. Jackson, were directed at him and Ms. Friedman, who are Jewish, as well as toward other Jews, one of the sources said.

That source would not say specifically what Ms. Regan is alleged to have said, but characterized the comments as offensive and inappropriate, but not a hateful tirade. Still, the source said, it was enough to prompt Mr. Murdoch to dismiss her.

Ms. Friedman, known to have had a testy relationship with Ms. Regan, called Mr. Murdoch in the late afternoon in New York to discuss Ms. Regan's behavior just as he was preparing to play host to the News Corporation's annual holiday party for employees from across the company's subsidiaries, which include the Fox television network, Fox News Channel, The New York Post, the 20th Century Fox film studio and the Web site MySpace.com.

Later that day, at the ReganBooks offices on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stunned Ms. Regan was confronted by security guards who arrived with boxes and ordered her to leave, according to an account by a HarperCollins executive that was confirmed by another person familiar with the situation.

"This came completely out of the blue," one executive said. "She was completely taken by surprise."

It was an abrupt decision that ended a tumultuous few weeks for Ms. Regan. She had publicly defended herself from what she called the "backstabbers at HarperCollins" during the taping of her Sirius Satellite Radio show on Thursday, according to the industry blog GalleyCat. And within the company, she had become convinced that there were "people trying to take her down," said a person familiar with the situation.

On Saturday, HarperCollins released a statement announcing that the Regan imprint would continue under Cal Morgan, Ms. Regan's longtime editorial director.

Ms. Regan was known for her sharp instincts and even sharper elbows, attributes that had served her well in her ascent from cub reporter at The National Enquirer to publisher of her own imprint under HarperCollins.

Although her empire was built on celebrity tell-alls like Drew Barrymore's "Little Girl Lost" and by bringing the porn star Jenna Jameson and the professional wrestler Mick Foley to the best-seller lists, Ms. Regan also published several highly respected books, including "The Zero" by Jess Walter, a National Book Award finalist this year. She also published political books by writers like Arianna Huffington and Peggy Noonan.

Last year, Mr. Murdoch allowed Ms. Regan to move her operations to Los Angeles, part of a strategy to build synergy between the publishing world and Hollywood. And it seemed to be working well, until the recent Simpson fiasco and a subsequent, though lesser, controversy over a novel about Mickey Mantle that purported to tell tales of drunkenness and sexual promiscuity in the late Yankee slugger's own voice.

At the heart of the problem, though, was what many executives said was a tense relationship between Ms. Regan and Ms. Friedman, her boss.

"They always had a difficult relationship," said one executive at a rival publishing house. "I don't think Jane was ever happy with Judith. You have two very considerable egos."

While Ms. Regan was rapidly losing credibility over the Simpson book, Ms. Friedman was enjoying a particularly bright moment in the spotlight. She had stayed silent during the Simpson controversy, never speaking to the press.

Last week, Ms. Friedman was named the Publishers Weekly Person of the Year, an honor within the industry. In the article about the award, Ms. Friedman was praised for managing to "distance the company from the book without openly confronting one of her publishers."

Longtime publishing executives traded in speculation about Ms. Regan's fate over the weekend, dismissing the idea that there was another company that would give her as much creative and financial autonomy as the News Corporation did.

"I think right this minute people are saying, She's a pariah and we don't want her," said Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. "But I've seen enough of publishing to say that that will change."

Some thought Ms. Regan might opt for Hollywood, her home of less than two years.

"She'll certainly have another life in entertainment," said Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent and the former head of the Time Warner Book Group. "I think she will rise from these ashes and find another place."

Anyone tempted to disparage Michael Crichton, the author of science fiction novels such as Jurassic Park and Airframe, should be aware of the dangers. However constructive the criticism, it's possible the writer will use the pages of his next book to strike back - and he is prepared to strike below the belt.

Last week Michael Crowley, a senior editor at The New Republic, a weekly political magazine, claimed he had become the victim of a "literary hit-and-run" in the pages of Crichton's newest tome, Next.

Crowley's crime was to pen an article in March highlighting Crichton's well-known disdain for anti-global warming activists, who he accuses of hyping climate science to back their cause, as well as the influence he allegedly wields in the White House.

"In his career," Crowley wrote, "Crichton has relentlessly propagandised on behalf of one big idea: that experts - scientists, intellectuals, reporters, and bureaucrats - are spectacularly corrupt and spectacularly wrong.

"The Bush administration has put this critique into action, trampling the opinions of scientists, exorcising economists, muzzling the press, and stifling State Department wonks.

"Crichton, in other words, primed America for the Bush era," he wrote, going on to note that after the release of State of Fear in 2004, Crichton was invited by a presidential aide to meet George Bush and had expounded his anti-intellectual cant to anyone who would listen on Capitol Hill.

In Next, Crichton has written a 431-page novel about genetic engineering run amok, filling his pages with modified apes chattering in German and parrots capable of holding conversations. But on page 227, the author strays into paragraphs seemingly included purely for retaliation.

He introduces a new figure who is apparently completely superfluous to the wider plot, curiously called Mick Crowley. His manhood is of unusually small dimensions and it has been places it should not have been. To avoid any confusion, the fictional Crowley is a political writer who went to Yale. Which describes the real Crowley too.

Crowley's doppelganger is on trial for raping his sister's two-year-old son after "experiencing an overwhelming urge to have anal sex" with him.

Elsewhere, he refers to his Crowley as a spoilt heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, a "dickhead", a "weasel" as well as "that political reporter who likes little boys".

The real Michael Crowley has responded by way of a riposte in the 25 December issue of The New Republic and is already on its website under a link entitled "Michael Crichton, Jurassic Prick".

He suggests that the author has tried to employ a doctrine called "the small penis rule" whereby it's safe to attack someone by way of a proxy literary figure who is under-endowed on the grounds that no one will ever publicly acknowledge that the guy is them.

Crowley said he was "strangely flattered". "If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won."

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire. And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

The road to this literary hit-and-run began back in March, when I wrote an article about Crichton pegged to his 2004 best-seller, State of Fear. The 624-page thriller presented global warming theory as the work of a fiendish cabal of liberal environmentalists, celebrities, journalists, academics, and politicians. Crichton's populist disdain for these "experts" dovetailed neatly, I argued, with the Bush administration's antiintellectual streak--and it was the reason that Karl Rove had invited Crichton for a chat with George W. Bush at the Oval Office and a right-wing senator had asked him to testify before his committee. Crichton discussed his White House visit with me, and our talk was friendly--though Crichton was clearly nervous about being linked to Bush. How ironic, then, that he wound up responding to my critique with a move worthy of Rove's playbook.

Indeed, much like a crude political operative, Crichton savages his cultural villains with sadistic glee. In Jurassic Park, a sleazy lawyer is consumed by a t-Rex while sitting on the toilet. State of Fear prominently featured a fatuous Hollywood liberal, remarkably similar to Martin Sheen, who winds up consumed by cannibals. But, despite his generally worshipful treatment in the press, Crichton loathes no creature like the journalist. His 1996 novel, Airframe, ostensibly about aviation disasters, was in fact a diatribe about the news media's cynicism and stupidity. Next, meanwhile, is peppered with sneering jibes at The New York Times. It's a strange crusade for the son of a journalist.

Thus far, no one seems to have publicly drawn the connection between Mick Crowley and Michael Crowley. In her November 28 review of Next, the Times's Janet Maslin nearly did, noting the presence of some oddly mean-spirited caricatures -- including, as Maslin put it, "a Washington political columnist and spoiled heir who turns out to have raped a 2-year-old." But, while Maslin generously called these characters "ham-handed," she didn't make the link. Others have, including a friend who called breathlessly from New York. When I accused him of a prank, he replied, "How could I possibly make that up?" True, I thought. My friend was not nearly demented enough.

I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level--particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child. It's uplifting, however, to learn that Next's sales have proved disappointing by Crichton's standards, continuing what an industry newsletter dubs Crichton's "recent pattern of erosion." And I'm looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.

Crichton launched his noxious attack from behind the shield of the small penis rule because, I'm sure, he's embarrassed by what he has done. In researching my article, I found a man who has long yearned for intellectual stature beyond the realm of killer dinosaurs and talking monkeys. And Crichton must know that turning a critic into a poorly endowed child rapist won't exactly aid his cause. Ultimately, then, I find myself strangely flattered. To explain why, let me propose a corollary to the small penis rule. Call it the small man rule: If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.

(Note: While we watched one of the dinosaur movies in the 1980s and have often seen Crichton paperbacks at the airport, we've got no idea what's in the actual books. If they really are nothing but angry attacks on his hundreds of enemies in the press, we might have to pick one up from the library sale or something.)
Crowley wrote a loooong article about Crichton's quackery for TNR, and the dinosaur writer's response was to create this charming character in a new book:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]-as was his custom-tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

This, as the actual journalist Michael Crowley explains, is known as the "small penis rule." If an author defames you in a book, you're unlikely to sue if you need to claim you're the character with the small penis. This is why Ann Coulter never sues anybody.

According to people who have read Crichton's paperbacks, most of his stories are about journalists (or Martin Sheen) being horribly killed by whatever Monster Rabbits, or global-warming scientists actually being serial killers or Space Robots or something.

We're hoping the increasingly unstable pulp writer will put a Wonkette in his next book. Would he be so crude as to have a Washington gossip blogger named, say, "Anne Mary Cocks" giving blowjobs for quarters outside Union Station while simultaneously aborting some of Rick Santorum's unborn children? Is he a big enough asshole to do that? Let's wait and see ....

THE U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has just fined well-known filmmaker Oliver Stone [$6,322.20] for violating what they euphemistically refer to as an "embargo," but which is in fact nothing but a barbaric, brutal, systematic blockade that is universally recognized as such, and which has been condemned by an overwhelming majority of United Nations members.

[Editor's Note: In the past fiscal year, OFAC fines to individuals and companies for failing to fulfill the restrictions of the embargo totaled $265,270].

Stone and his production company Ixtlan were charged for having traveled to Cuba in 2002 and 2003 to shoot footage for two films on the leader of the Cuban Revolution. The newspaper El Nuevo Herald, the voice of the anti-Cuban mafia in south Florida, carried the news in its December 12 edition.

In medieval times, such edicts took the form of admonitions. This modern Inquisition revives that age-old practice: the message is obviously directed against those who try to exercise their rights to creativity and expression, or who try to objectively reflect the realities in the Island. This is true even in the case of Oliver Stone, who no one in their right mind could call anti-American after watching - as hundreds of Havana spectators have done during the 28th Havana Film Festival - his movie World Trade Center, about the atrocious terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers.

The difficulties Stone's had in making his films on Fidel are well-known. The first, Comandante, which he made for the HBO cable network, could not be screened as originally scheduled because of pressure from the Miami-based anti-Cuba lobby and its right-wing sponsors.

Stone had to give in to demands to return to Cuba and film again, this time to include interviews with employees of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana [America's de-facto Embassy], whose capacity for histrionics in the service of demonizing the Cuban Revolution - was shredded in the new production, Looking for Fidel.

It is very likely that OFAC officials took note of Stone's statements during the presentation of Looking for Fidel at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain: "Castro is a great host," he said. "He looks you straight in the eye. He gave me the impression that he trusted me, and I like that ... I was able to ask all of my questions about internal conflicts in the country, the future of Cuba after Castro, and the international pressure that is placed on Cuba, especially by the president of the United States, George W. Bush. ... Castro is one of the wisest men there are; he is a survivor and a Quixote. I admire his Revolution, his faith in himself and his honesty."

For the current authorities in North America, free expression and unprejudiced opinion like this comes only at a price. Hence, excuses and contrivances must be concocted - despite the fact that Stone's producers complied with a confusing and cumbersome licensing process - all to punish and impede people from thinking for themselves.

It doesn't matter that the U.S. Administration has made more obvious something that everyone already knows: those who are imposing a criminal blockade against Cuba are victimizing their own people, by prevented them from traveling freely to the island.