With a covetous eye on the success of portable music players, mobile phone makers are going after would-be iPod buyers by building high-quality players into their handsets.

An Advertising Council Inc.-commissioned pro bono television spot by McCann-Erickson New York to encourage donations benefiting victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami has generated tremendous interest. Thanks to the campaign, the site last month received 1.3 million visitors. An average of 44,000 individuals daily visited the site, a sizable increase over its 2004 daily average of 5,700 visitors.

The Internet unit of Major League Baseball on Tuesday said it has reached an agreement to buy online ticket seller Tickets.com Inc. in a deal valued at about $66 million.

Customer satisfaction with e-commerce moguls Amazon.com and eBay has eroded in the last year, according to the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI is a closely watched barometer of consumers' brand perceptions, including those of online retailers.

Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman had covered higher education for years but on May 30, 2003, they found out that - in journalism - there's no such thing as tenure. On that day, both Mr. Jaschik and Mr. Lederman, the editor and managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, announced they were leaving the paper, where they had both worked for nearly 20 years. They did not explain why.

With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.

Reuters has introduced an interactive television channel that will deliver video news stories online from its global news network.

24/7 Real Media announced the opening of a new Tokyo office to expand its search engine marketing (SEM) platform in the Asia Pacific region today. The company will initially focus on the SEM business via 24/7 Search and eventually phase in other components within its media and technology offerings, including its behavioral marketing solution and its ad-serving and analytics platform.

The world's largest mobile phone maker Nokia and software company Microsoft struck a deal Monday to make it easier for consumers to buy digital music on-line and play it back on their handsets. In a comprehensive agreement, which involves a separate deal with digital media company Loudeye, Nokia agreed to put Microsoft's music player software into its handsets.

Microsoft and Pfizer took coordinated legal action yesterday against two groups sending junk e-mail messages that offer illegal generic versions of Viagra, Pfizer's best-selling drug for erectile dysfunction.