February 14, 2000. Wikipedia doesn’t exist. Neither does Facebook. iPhones won’t launch for another six years. And tweeting is still reserved for birds.

In an age when people read the (still fat) newspaper over breakfast, founder Stephen Mayne published Crikey – solely, shock, online – for the first time. It featured an insiders account of litigation against NAB (shares plummeted), a Howard government insider dishing the dirt, a profile of Col Allen headlined “Pissing in the Sink” and a personal account by a journo of being strangled by a politician…

“Crikey was built on a solid foundation of tip-offs, leaks, and the odd journalistic hand grenade,” said Crikey editor Marni Cordell. “Fifteen years and more than 40,000 stories later, we’re still proudly irritating the powerful.”

Some 17,000 subscribers pay to get the Crikey email in their inboxes every weekday filled with news, backgrounding, analysis, and insider information from the world of politics, media, government, business and Australian society.

“We believe the vast upheaval in media over the past fifteen years has only increased the importance of truly independent journalism that operates without agendas,” said Private Media chairman Eric Beecher.

In the last 15 years we’ve witnessed an epic transformation of the media. To celebrate surviving and thriving amongst the upheaval, Crikey will be publishing a series of special features over the year including:

• guest editorials from prominent Australians such as Clive Palmer, Maxine McKew, Julian Burnside, Geoff Gallop, Anne Summers, Julian Morrow and Wendy Harmer.
• an interactive timeline of 15 years of epic media transformation
• celebrities (ok most pollies and journos including Annabel Crabb, Kristina Keneally and Jon Faine) reading out mean tips featuring… themselves
• notes from the digital disruption: interviews with players from the media frontline on surviving the revolution
• The Powers That Be: essays on the nature of media and power in Australia
• Best Leaks: the best gets from the last 15 years and how we landed them
• The next 15 years… futurists predict what’s next
• Special investigations