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This Just In: Media

The Times Magazine's hidden Web

By Dan Kennedy

It's a familiar lament among Web surfers who read the New York Times online (http://www.nytimes.com): they still have to shell out for the Sunday paper to get the New York Times Magazine unless they want to blow another $10 or $20 a month on an America Online membership. The Times, you see, puts the entire paper up on the Web except for the magazine, the electronic version of which is available solely through AOL.

Unless you know where to look.

It turns out that the Times really does publish the magazine on the Web, but makes it difficult to find unless you have access to the table of contents that's offered exclusively on AOL. Difficult, that is, but not impossible.

Enter http://www.nytimes.com/partners/aol/mag/article1.html, and you'll come to the magazine's big story for the week. You can navigate by choosing "next article" or "previous article" at the bottom of each piece, or by changing the URL to "article2.html," "article10.html," and so on. You won't know where you're going until you get there, but you'll eventually stumble across the entire magazine, right down to the letters to the editor, William Safire's "On Language" column, and the self-indulgent "Lives" piece that closes the book each week. For an image of the cover, try "article20.html." You'll also find old articles that haven't been flushed out yet.

If nothing else, this quirk illustrates perfectly the changes AOL has been implementing since the ubiquitous, wide-open Web first began challenging proprietary online services in 1994. Pre-Web, AOL attempted to sign up content providers such as the Times to exclusive deals. Now, under new president Robert Pittman, the former chief of MTV, the service is trying to lure advertisers by making its interface look more like a cable-TV menu, offering a combination of original and republished content and links to non-AOL Web sites.

Ted Leonsis, who's in charge of developing original content for AOL, put it this way in a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal: "Fully developed media companies should be in both distribution and content."