This week we continue Crikey’s 15th birthday celebration with the last of our commemorative timeline entries, this time for 2014.

It was a year for all news, great and small. Via Twitter, Michelle Obama pleaded with terrorist organisation Boko Haram to return almost 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls.

The hubbub preceding Seth Rogen’s and James Franco’s The Interview — which depicted the fictionalised assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — failed to endure beyond the film’s release, as the thing was branded a critical flop.

Kim Kardashian’s shapely buttocks tried, and failed, to break the internet (but they did get a few tongues wagging).

Back in Australia, Mike Carlton quit writing for Fairfax after a series of online bust-ups with his detractors, and the ABC’s state-based 7.30 programs were axed due to Abbott’s budget cuts.

Here at Crikey, our very own Paddy Manning broke one of the year’s biggest media/business stories, reporting the leak of News Corp’s fabled “Blue Book”, containing the company’s darkest financial and earnings-related secrets.