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Web sales went nuts this season over last, rising more than 300 percent, but it was a great season all around, and traditional retailers also report brisk sales. Online holiday sales rose to close to $11 billion, well above earlier projections, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group, accounting for an estimated 1.2 percent of all sales, up from .5 percent a year earlier. And this despite rising worries that e-tailers would not be able to deliver gifts on time. But even with such growth it appears e-commerce wasn't the killer many brick and mortar shops feared; sales at malls across America rose a healthy 7.7 percent, reports The Wall Street Journal, citing figures from the International Council of Shopping Centers.
ABC's New Year's
coverage tops in viewers
If you’re American, chances are you caught some of ABC News’s 24-hour
millennium coverage, which began early in the morning on Dec. 31 and ran several hours
into the year 2000, anchored throughout by Peter Jennings. The network claims that 175
million viewers watched some part of the coverage. That’s more people than watched
NBC and CBS’s broadcasts together. Highlights of the telecast included fireworks
displays in London and Paris and a live broadcast from a refugee camp in Djibouti. After
the ABC News marathon, NBC’s nine-hour broadcast was the most popular, followed by
CBS’s coverage of the festivities in Washington D.C. CBS’s Dan Rather also took
to Times Square on Friday and Saturday for his evening news broadcasts. Rather sat
overlooking Times Square, which is dominated by NBC's Jumbotron TV screen billboard. Loath
to give the competition free ad space, CBS digitally obscured the Jumbotron with a CBS
Evening News graphic.
Globe scribe indicted in Ramsey case
There's been an arrest in the JonBenet Ramsey
case. Globe editor Craig Lewis has been indicted on charges of bribery and criminal
extortion arising from his investigation into the 1997 murder of of the Boulder
child beauty queen. Lewis allegedly offered to buy a ransom note from Donald Vacca, a
former police officer and document expert, for $30,000 in cash shortly after the murder.
When Vacca refused, Lewis upped the amount, subsequently repeating his offer in person and
over the phone, says the indictment. The reporter is also charged with threatening to run
a slanderous story about detective Steve Thomas’s deceased mother if Thomas refused
to grant an interview. The Globe said in an official statement that the charges against
Lewis "are without merit" and pledged to continue its investigation into the
as-yet unsolved murder of Ramsey. Richard Valvo, a spokesperson for the magazine, declined
further comment.