Forbes does this in a somewhat confusing manner. Fast Company and the Village Voice are examples of content-rich sites I wish were done this way. In general, I think, news sites should optimise for surfers who visit daily. This allows reasonably efficient browsing of missed issues. Salon archives by date is outstanding here.
Some sites even change the URL when they archive an issue, making linking extremely inconvenient.
So when you visit the site, you first see a tempting text page with no frame, then, just as you reach to scroll it, it vanishes and the frame appears excruciatingly slowly, and finally the text reappears, squeezed down now into a corner of the window. Ain't It Cool movie news not only loads slowly, but server overload often produces an 'empty document' error. To choose the winner here, I asked myself what sites I most look forward to seeing, and the Irish Times stood out a mile for its attractive page design. I almost always give up on these without reading them at all. When you look from a distance, adding a few of these variants may look a lot nicer than the usual dull grey rectangle, but once you start reading the text, dull grey is really where it's at.