In these days of subscription fatigue, shelling out another $5 or $10 a month for yet another monthly fee can be…well, fatiguing. Whether you choose to pay for this site or news site is your choice, but even Croesus couldn’t afford to subscribe to everything you might want to read.
Even worse, if you only want to read one article, you often are given only the choice of paying for a month or a year.
Also, you may often find articles suggested to you but which are being a paywall. If you search for some popular news topic on Google, Bing, etc. you’ll often get some tantalizing headlines and excerpts…followed by a pitch to “start your subscription today”.
Now this doesn’t necessarily give you moral carte blanche to read anything you want, but there are some completely legit – and some less-legit – ways to read nearly any news article for free. Here are five of them, roughly ranked from “most likely to work” to “least likely to work”.
1. Search for the Headline and Read it on an Aggregator
A lot of major – and expensive – news sites federate their content to aggregator sites. These aggregator sites show more ads (sometimes to an obnoxious degree) and kick back some revenue to the publisher. But they don’t paywall the content.
For example, at this moment there is an article on the Wall Street Journal titled “U.S. and Iran to Hold High-Stakes Nuclear Talks”. If you try to read it on wsj.com, you’ll need a subscription. But I just copied that title and pasted it into Bing, and found it on MSN. The exact same article, in full, for free. And this is by WSJ’s agreement – MSN isn’t breaking any rules, and neither are you.
Note that on mobile, sometimes these sites will require you to read through their app, but on desktop this usually isn’t the case.
2. Use an Archive Site
And by archive site, I mean the legendary archive.today (or archive.ph and other mirrors). Find a URL you want to read, paste it into archive.today, and there’s a very good chance it’s been archived there. In my experience, it’s often 90%+. The more popular a site or article is, the more likely it’s on archive.today.
How does it work? I have no idea. You can find more on its background here.
3. Check the Wayback
While archive.today also slips around paywalls, archive.org’s Wayback Machine often doesn’t. Still, it’s worth a try.
4. Use Social Media
People often will quote – sometimes in entirety – news articles, particularly if the topic is controversial. Try searching for the headline plus “site:reddit.com” or on other sites.
5. Try RSS
Some sites include full articles in their RSS feeds. Tools like Inoreader or Feedly let you subscribe (in the RSS sense) and preview articles. Worth checking if your target outlet provides generous RSS output.
I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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