Our King-Size Exclusive

By James Kelly, Managing Editor

Our magazine comes out weekly, but TIME.COM, our nimble and sprightly website, comes out daily, hourly--it is TIME all the time. Rick Stengel, the editor of time.com likes to say our website is a gene spliced from the magazine and then grown in a new environment. And it has grown, in terms of not only traffic and readership but also importance: in the past few weeks, time.com has broken the story of Bill Clinton's deal with independent counsel Robert Ray as well as the amount of Denise Rich's gift to the Clinton library.

Next week time.com will score another coup when it launches an online excerpt of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, his first full-length novel in three years. Time.com will publish a more than 6,000-word excerpt starting Monday, March 5, with the next installments appearing March 12 and March 19. King himself is no stranger to the Web or to TIME. When he published his novella Riding the Bullet last year, we put him on the cover with the legend Do-It-Yourself.com. It was due in part to that cover that King thought of TIME when he was publishing his new book, a disturbing story of four old friends on a hunting trip who encounter some unexpected creatures in the woods. Scribner will publish the hard-cover version March 20.

In addition to the online excerpt, you will find an exclusive video of King introducing the book, plus an extensive archive of TIME material on the master of the macabre, as well as an online Stephen King contest that will test your knowledge of all things King. The winners will get inscribed copies of the book. Pop quiz: Name the only movie King wrote and directed. For the answer, go to time.com

Our cover story three weeks ago on the AIDS epidemic in Africa has drawn hundreds of letters from readers, many of whom have donated money to Netaid.org an arm of the U.N. So far, more than $200,000 has been collected. If you would like to help, simply visit Netaid.org AOL members can go to Keyword: Breaking the Silence. And for those who want to drop a check in the mail, the address is Netaid.org Foundation, 336 East 45th Street, New York, N.Y. 10017.

James Kelly, Managing Editor