As the holidays approach, gift giving - and online buying - are in full swing. Publishers selling products, from subscriptions to travel packages to household items, can only better their businesses by making their sites easier and safer to use.

Scott Smigler, founder and president of Internet marketing company Exclusive Concepts, Inc., which specialises in small to mid-sized online retailers, wrote a checklist of advice for those selling online. His advice, featured on Mashable.com, states that one of the most important things retailers can do is make sure quality control is utmost. This includes making sure customers understand the site is secure, easy to use, is error-free, and loads quickly on all types of browsers.

For the full list, visit his article on Mashable.com.

Image: onlineshopsblog.com

A bill that would create harsher punishments for those who attack journalists has been submitted to the lower house of the country's parliament, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported. However, the legislation is "not enough," said lawmaker Irina Yarovaya.

Earlier this month, two journalists were violently attacked in Moscow. Oleg Kashin was beaten outside of his home and had to be put into an induced coma, and Anatoly Adamchuk was attacked two days later, according to Journalism.co.uk.

Photo via RIA Novosti: Oleg Kashin, a reporter for Kommersant, was beaten outside his home earlier this month.
Russia has one of the worst safety records for journalists in the world, ranked fifth, behind Iraq, the Philippines, Colombia and Mexico, according tot he International Press Institute. At least 35 journalists were murdered in Russia between 2000 and 2009, RIA Novosti noted.

Swedish media group Bonnier last week launched its News+ system for the iPad, a product that aims to start from scratch, fresh for the tablet, minonline.com reported today.

The concept for the News+ product is an answer to the question, "What if the newspaper had only been invented in the age of tablets?" and creates a tablet-specific experience that is completely different from print and the Web, minonline's Steve Smith explained.

Bonnier, which owns titles including Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Borsen, Dagens Industri and Sydesvenskan, previewed a magazine design platform for tablets and touchscreens in 2009, called Mag+. It has since been used for multiple magazine platforms, News & Tech reported.

Previously, Bonnier also worked on the Popular Science iPad app, according to touchreviews.net.

"Reading News+ means taking part in a conversation. You can connect with your social networks, and share the articles that you want to talk about with your friends," a video created by Bonnier explains. It also details its plans for the future of advertising, and how ads can be more helpful and interactive.

Here is the video that shows what Bonnier envisions to be the future of newspapers:

The oldest newspaper in Indiana will begin delivering in the mornings instead of later in the day, and will also close its Monday edition in order to publish on Saturdays instead, The Associated Press reported today.

The changes at the Vincennes Sun-Commercial will begin Dec. 11, and were implemented because readers and advertisers prefer getting their news earlier in the day, as well as having an edition on Saturday, publisher Rob Eilts said.

The newspaper already publishes a Sunday edition, and will be able to offer readers coverage of Friday night sports the first thing Saturday morning, Editor Gayle Robbins told the AP in an article published by the Chicago Tribune.

The newspaper's online edition has a closed paywall. When readers click on a headline, they are directed to a login page or asked to select a subscription service: US$1 per day, $5.70 per month, $17.10 for three months, $34.20 for six months and $68.40 for a year.

The time audiences spend with mainstream media coverage of elections is declining in Australia, The Australian reported today.

When looking at newspaper, television, radio and online, political scientist Sally Young found that some television and newspaper audiences may be migrating online, but the percentage of people saying they use the Internet "many times" for election news rose from 0 percent in 1987 to just 5 percent 20 years later. Specifically in print, the research shows that the number of hard political stories is down, in proportion of total print content; however, some newspapers are doing "much more" online, she said.

Image: Sally Young's book, "How Australia Decides: Election Reporting and the Media" will be published in December

Apple and News Corp may be ready to launch The Daily on December 9, according to John Gruber, of Daring Fireball. Apple may also announce subscriptions through iTunes, enabling consumers to receive automatically delivered newspapers and magazines directly to their iPads.

Rupert Murdoch's first tablet-only publication will be launched exclusively as an app for the iPad, and appear later on Android tablets. Its budget is believed to be US$30 million, with a staff of about 100.

Currently, iPad users download and pay for digital issues of a publication one issue at a time, Digital Trends pointed out.

"In addition to this being moderately inconvenient, it also keeps consumer information out of publishers' hands. Which is why, up to this point, publishers haven't warmed to the idea of rolling subscriptions through the App Store. Apple's refusal to share subscriber data limits publishers' ability to target their audiences for advertising and marketing purposes."

Online videos, including that from YouTube, Netflix and other sites with Flash video, takes up 37 percent of Internet traffic during peak television-watching hours in the United States, TechCrunch reported.

When broken down by top Web video players, 10 percent comes from YouTube, 21 percent comes from Netflix and 6 percent comes from Flash Video. Meanwhile, all HTTP Web traffic is just 23 percent of the total.

Image: Shaping the Future of the Newspaper's World Digital Media Trends report 2009, (c) WAN-IFRA
But that doesn't mean the main activity on the Web is watching videos. Traffic is measured by bandwidth used and how many bits are transferred, TechCrunch explains. Streaming video requires more bits than just loading a Web page; thus, "video is hogging up the bandwidth."

However, North American Internet users are behind other regions in terms of consumption, Multichannel explained. In the Asia-Pacific region, the median is 12 gigabytes. The global average last year was three gigabytes.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought on Monday 90 percent of Wireless Generation, a U.S. company that develops mobile and Internet educational software for teachers, Bloomberg revealed. The media group paid US$360 million in cash for the acquisition.

"We see a $500bn sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching," said Murdoch, The Telegraph quoted.

According to the Financial Times, the deal will allow News Corp compete other media groups that have invested in software and education services like Pearson, which owns the FT Group.

This is the first time in almost 20 years that News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will "foray into the for-profit world of education since its book publishing arm, Harper Collins, got out of the textbook business in the mid-1990s," The New York Times reminded.

There is a saying in French, "Le Hasard Fait Bien les Choses," which can be translated as "Fate is a Good Provider."

No other expression best applies to what happened to me while I was reading one of this week's class readings: "Social Media Can Open Door to Philantropy's Future," by Larry Blumenthal.

In his opinion column, Blumenthal describes a workshop he led for staff from a variety of foundations to convince them that there were no such thing as social media. To him, engaging with social media is tantamount to fostering collaboration, openness, transparency, timeliness, sharing work in progress, embracing and learning from failure. In this respect, the author believes, any person claiming that social media does not seem relevant to his or her work is - to say the least - totally wrong!

Little by little, Blumenthal's arguments started to convince me...I was seduced. Actually, I believe i wanted to be convinced.

Such an easy thing: all I had to do was to keep reading his piece to the end and say to myself "He is so right! I should not be concerned anymore with spending hours a day on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or YouTube while studying at the same time, that is actually good for me! This is a better way to stay informed! This is a tool that can help me do what I am already doing, only more effectively."

Australia's Fairfax Media Ltd. will combine the print, online and classified divisions of its metropolitan newspapers under a single unit, called Australian Metropolitan Media division, in an effort to increase efficiency and cut cots in the company, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Chief Executive Officer Brian McCarthy said the strategy aims to increase news offerings across platforms and content-sharing between its newspapers, which include The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times.

"Such that the print product isn't as predictable if you've gone on to smh.com already the night before, so that'll be one of the things I'll be trying to achieve - a better balance of content," said McCarthy, ABC News quoted.

However, no one has been appointed yet to run the new unit, which reduced Fairfax's divisions from eleven to nine and is expected to save $9.9 million. According to The Australian, the new position will "be fiercely contested," pointing out that some of the candidates include editor-in-chief of The Sidney Morning Herald Peter Fray, The Sun-Herald director Greg Hywood and Jack Matthews, head of former Fairfax Digital.

Just as News Corp announced it would block Google from indexing its content last year, so, too has U.S. television entertainment company Viacom.

Earlier this year Viacom also took its content out of Hulu.com, a site where television programmes can be watched online, because the two could not agree on payment. In response to the situation with Google TV, Viacom told paidContent in a statement: "We're blocking access to our full episode content from Google TV's Web browser. We continue to evaluate Google TV to identify opportunities where it may make sense to optimize our Web content for the platform."

U.S. television networks NBC and CBS, ABC and Fox have also treated Google TV as a new form of distribution and are working on blocking their programming from the platform, AdWeek noted. This is likely because the networks don't want to damage relationships with cable and affiliate partners.

"The ecosystem in TV pays for the content," one media executive told MediaWeek earlier this month. "I'm not sure Google gets that. They are approaching this as if it's an academic MBA project."