Brock N. Meeks

Brock N. Meeks (born 1956) is an American investigative journalist. He pioneered the field of online journalism and founded one of the preeminent online publications, CyberWire Dispatch, in 1994. At its peak, CyberWire Dispatch was distributed to more than 800,000 readers via mailing lists and newsgroups. At the height of his online career, Meeks was "the most widely read reporter in cyberspace." CyberWire Dispatch officially ceased publication in early 2004.

Meeks's articles focused on the intersection of government and technology, and were among the first to explore issues such as online rights – including free speech and the right to privacy – encryption, censorship, and the regulation of content.

Meeks gained a degree of fame he'd probably rather not have by being the first journalist sued for libel in cyberspace while writing his CyberWire Dispatch. Journalist and author Dan Gilmor wrote in his book "We the Media": "[Meeks] was, by most accounts, the first Internet journalist to be sued for libel. For all practical purposes, Meeks won the case; he paid nothing to the Ohio company that sued him over his critical report about the company’s business practices, though he did agree to notify the company before publishing anything else about it or the man who ran it. Meeks did pay his lawyers, including several noted First Amendment specialists who donated the vast majority of their time. He was lucky, in a sense, because his case drew the attention of people who wanted to protect our rights."

In the mid-1990s, Meeks was the Washington correspondent for Wired magazine and its online counterpart, HotWired. He wrote features for the magazine and produced two columns for HotWired: Muckraker and Campaign Dispatch. The latter was dedicated to his coverage of the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign.

From 1997 to 2006, Meeks served as chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC.com, covering a variety of policy-related technology topics, including civil liberties and legislative attempts to control the Internet.

After the September 11th attacks in 2001, Meeks created and developed the homeland security beat for MSNBC.com. His work on national security won him the Carnegie Mellon Cybersecurity Journalism award in 2005.

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