Amazon has announced an exclusive deal with Newsweek: "Only on Kindle, Newsweek's editors and writers will release four biographies on the presidential and vice presidential candidates" (via Amazon Kindle's Blog). The biographies, available on October 15, are Mr. Cool: The Best of Newsweek's Up-Close Coverage of Barack Obama, Mr. Hot: The Best of Newsweek's Up-Close Coverage of John McCain, The Outsider: The Best of Newsweek's Up-Close Coverage of Sarah Palin, and The Insider : The Best of Newsweek's Up-Close Coverage of Joe Biden. Teleread writes, "While some people will bemoan the fact that Amazon is 'locking up' content, I think that the bigger picture is more important. The more major media outlets become familiar with e-publishing the more we will see it flourish."

Following news that "Tina Fey's Sarah Palin skits were viewed twice as many times online and via DVR recordings than in original broadcasts," NBC is planning a separate SNL Web portal, but "some worry that NBC won't be able to monetize the site and it may launch too late to capture the SNL buzz from Ms. Fey's spoofs and other pre-election skits" (via The Observer's Media Mob). However, Mashable thinks "controlling the content yourself instead of having people share it somewhere else on their own is a good enough reward." Epicenter sees it as "an obvious move for the ailing comedy show that's suddenly found itself relevant again."

Poor newspapers. The New York Times reported yesterday that "the growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl," and "after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling." The Industry Standard calls newspapers' adding podcasts and other media features "a case of publishers desperately trying whatever cool technologies are being talked about at the moment. In 2004, it was blogs. In 2005, it was podcasts and wikis. In 2006, Second Life was the Next Big Thing. 2007 was the year Twitter became hot, and newspapers began misguided experiments like this one. . . . there's a great fear in the newspaper industry of being left behind as the online world overtakes print." The Noisy Channel says this all is "no wonder: Google is mixing up search, advertising, and publication, while newspapers are responding to this competitive pressure by sliding down the slippery slope into becoming aggregators." And Marketing Pilgrim asks, "[W]ill enough publishers realize they need to pull back on the number of ad units they sell, before the online newspaper space collapses under the weight of its own saturation?"