How to Get Around Newspaper

Paywalls in 2019
How to bypass newspaper paywalls and access the WSJ, NYT,
Washington Post, Business Insider, Financial Times for free

Casey Botticello Follow

Feb 7 · 11 min read

Source: Casey Botticello

A paywall is a method of restricting access to content via a paid

subscription. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started
implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase
revenue after years of decline in paid print readership and
advertising revenue. In academics, research papers are often
subject to a paywall and are available via academic libraries that
subscribe.

Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales has stated that he “would rather

write [an opinion piece] where it is going to be read”, declaring that
“putting opinion pieces behind paywalls [makes] no sense.”
Without easy access to both read and share insights and opinions,
the online news platform loses an essential characteristic of
democratic exchange.

This article is not meant to debate the commodiKcation of

information. If you use a news-source regularly for work or
personal use, and derive signiKcant value from it, you should pay
for it. But in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, it is not
economically feasible for a casual reader to pay for a costly monthly
or yearly subscription to dozens of news sites.

Below is a (nearly) comprehensive guide to the various

methods allowing you get around paywalls, pop-ups, and
adwalls, that are common on many news sites. There will always
be one or two articles that you cannot access without a purchase or
compromising your personal information, but you should be able
to access at least 95% of news content for free using these
tricks. These techniques will help you get around paywalls for
the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post,
Financial Times, and more, without requiring username and
password logins credentials or illegal hacking.

One last note before you start hacking paywalls. If you only need
access to these sites for a brief period of time, you may be better oN
taking advantage of the free trial periods many publications oNer
and cancelling your subscription before it renews:

Wall Street Journal-14 Day Free Trial

The New York Times-14 Day Free Trial

The Economist-30 Day Free Trial

TIME Magazine-30 Day Free Trial

The Washington Post-14 Day Free Trial

How to Get Around Almost any Paywall Easily

(UPDATED 5/2/19 with new WSJ Bypass)
I vowed to Knd a way around their paywall after they sent a cease
and desist to Outline (still an amazing resource for many news
sites). It took me a few tries to Knd something that works, but here
you go:

1. Use The Following Firefox Browser Add-on

 Click Here for the Link

Link: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
Krefox/blob/master/README.md

Note: this add-on reportedly works on these other sites as well

(although I have not tested all of them):

Baltimore Sun (baltimoresun.com)

Barron’s (barrons.com)
Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
Caixin (caixinglobal.com)
Chemical & Engineering News (cen.acs.org)
Central Western Daily (centralwesterndaily.com.au)
Chicago Tribune (chicagotribune.com)
Crain’s Chicago Business (chicagobusiness.com)
Corriere Della Sera (corriere.it)
Daily Press (dailypress.com)
Denver Post (denverpost.com)
De Tijd (tijd.be)
de Volkskrant (volkskrant.nl)
The Economist (economist.com)
Examiner (examiner.com.au)
Financial Times (ft.com)
Foreign Policy (foreignpolicy.com)
Glassdoor (glassdoor.com)
Haaretz (haaretz.co.il / haaretz.com)
Handelsblatt (handelsblatt.com)
Hartford Courant (courant.com)
Harvard Business Review (hbr.org)
Inc.com (inc.com)
Investors Chronicle (investorschronicle.co.uk)
Irish Times (irishtimes.com)
La Repubblica (repubblica.it)
Le Temps (letemps.ch)
Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Medium (medium.com)
Medscape (medscape.com)
MIT Technology Review (technologyreview.com)
Mountain View Voice (mv-voice.com)
National Post (nationalpost.com)
New Statesman (newstatesman.com)
New York Magazine (nymag.com)
Nikkei Asian Review (asia.nikkei.com)
NRC (nrc.nl)
Orange County Register (ocregister.com)
Orlando Sentinel (orlandosentinel.com)
Palo Alto Online (paloaltoonline.com)
Quora (quora.com)
SunSentinel (sun-sentinel.com)
Tech in Asia (techinasia.com)
The Advocate (theadvocate.com.au)
The Age (theage.com.au)
The Australian (theaustralian.com.au)
The Australian Financial Review (afr.com)
The Boston Globe (bostonglobe.com)
The Globe and Mail (theglobeandmail.com)
The Herald (theherald.com.au)
The Japan Times (japantimes.co.jp)
TheMarker (themarker.com)
The Mercury News (mercurynews.com)
The Morning Call (mcall.com)
The Nation (thenation.com)
The New York Times (nytimes.com)
The New Yorker (newyorker.com)
The News-Gazette (news-gazette.com)
The Saturday Paper (thesaturdaypaper.com.au)
The Spectator (spectator.co.uk)
The Business Journals (bizjournals.com)
The Seattle Times (seattletimes.com)
The Sydney Morning Herald (smh.com.au)
The Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk)
The Times (thetimes.co.uk)
The Toronto Star (thestar.com)
The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com)
The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com)
Towards Data Science (towardsdatascience.com)
Vanity Fair (vanityfair.com)
Wired (wired.com)

iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-Mrefox
Bypass Paywalls for Firefox. Contribute to iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-Mrefox
development by creating an account on…
github.com

You should see a page like this:

 Github: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-Mrefox

If you scroll down, you will see the following:

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

Click the download link. Accept the Firefox permission popups that
appear.

Customize. You can customize the browser extension. If you have

other existing logins, make sure you deselect these news sites as
this add-on will log you out of them.

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

You now should see the following icon at the top of your Firefox
browser:

The add-on runs automatically, and it basically obscures the origin

of your tradc so that you will appear to be a user from another
country/region, where they still do not have a fully hardened
paywall.
Your now unlocked article should look something like this:

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

Note: The promotional ads are a good thing and mean that your
visits/origin are being correctly obscured.

You may have to close a few popup windows as seen below:

 Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

But you can simply click the “X” in the upper right hand corner of
the popup. A small price to pay for unlimited access to the Wall
Street Journal (WSJ) and many other great sites!

2. Open Article in a Private/Incognito Browser

Opening an article in a private/incognito browser and pasting the
URL of the article you’re trying to read, is probably one of the
simplest methods to gaining access to premium news sites.

In Chrome, that means selecting “File” and then “New Incognito

Window”:
 Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

In Firefox/Safari, you press “New Private Window”:

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

This paywall bypass is typically eQective on The Washington

Post, The New Yorker, and the New York Times.

3. Use Outline to Extract Article Text

Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles. It
does a good job of removing ads and other digital clutter. You can
simply enter the URL of an article in the search bar on Outline’s
home page:
 Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

Alternatively, you can insert “outline.com/” before a news article’s

URL and Outline will usually be able to auto extract the text from
the article, giving you not only the article blocked by a paywall but
the article without additional ads.

Take for example the following article:

The Decline of Historical Thinking

Having ignored questions of economic inequality for
decades, economists and other scholars have recently
discovered a…
www.newyorker.com
The New Yorker has a metered paywall, meaning you can only view
a certain amount of articles per month. If you have exceeded this
limit but still need access, Outline can be an extremely useful tool.

Sample New Yorker Article Blocked By Paywall

To bypass the New Yorker Paywall for this article, enter

“outline.com/” before the article URL. This is essentially allowing
you to run the article through Outline’s search function.

Entering “outline.com/” in Search Bar

After quickly analyzing the article, Outline extracts the text giving
you the article in full:

Article Now Available in Full

This paywall bypass is typically eQective on The Washington

Post, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal (no longer supported by Outline), Financial Times,
Bloomberg, Telecompaper, and many regional papers.

4. Disable JavaScript in Your Browser

The previous two methods will cover most articles the average
reader will need. However there are a few sites that require
additional tricks. Another eNective and incredibly simple method to
access an article blocked by paywalls is to disable JavaScript in your
browser.

Let’s use the following article as an example:

Halcyon raising its Mrst fund - Washington

Business Journal
D.C.-based Halcyon is raising its Mrst fund. The 2-year-
old nonproMt, an S&R Foundation spinout running
programming…
www.bizjournals.com

When you click on this article, you will immediately be confronted

with a paywall, regardless of your browsing history:
 BizJournal Paywall Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

To get around the Bizjournal paywall, right click anywhere on the

article page, and select “inspect” or “inspect element” from the
menu.

The menu that appears when you “right click” on the article page (as seen in di]erent
browsers)

Using the example article, after right clicking on the page and
selecting “inspect element” you will see the following screen:
 Inspect Element Screen for Article Paywall

Next you want to click on the button typically labeled “customize

developer tools” or “developer tools.” In the screenshot above,
utilizing Firefox as our browser, this button is the “three dots” icon
to the far right of the screen:
 Customize Developer Tools Button in “Inspect Element”

To access the Chrome DevTools (that’s what they call theirs) open a
web page in Google Chrome, select the Chrome menu at the top-
right of your browser and then select Tools > Developers Tools.
Alternatively you can just right-click on any element on your web
page and select Inspect Element.

Chrome Developer Tools

Once you select the “Developer Tools” button, you can now disable
JavaScript. The screenshots below show the buttons or options you
need to select to disable JavaScript:
 Button to disable JavaScript in Firefox

Below are some screenshots of disabling JavaScript in other

browsers:

Disabling JavaScript in Various Browsers

After disabling JavaScript, you can now view the raw text from the
article, and the paywall, which utilizes JavaScript, is removed:
 Article Displaying Text After Disabling JavaScript

This paywall bypass is typically eQective on any of the Business

Journal Publications (not limited to Washington, D.C.),
Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, and many regional papers.

5. Delete the Adwall Layer

If you have tried the three methods described above, and still
cannot access an article due to a paywall or adwall, there is another
trick involving “Inspect Element” as described in Method #4.

Let’s use a Business Insider article which is physically obscured by

an adwall:
 Biotech, CBD drinks, and a hot vape company:
Here's where all the top marijuana VCs are
looking to…
Business Insider spoke with some of the top marijuana
VCs about their strategies for 2019. The VCs, including…
www.businessinsider.com

If you do not have a subscription to Business Insider Prime, you will

likely be confronted by the following paywall:

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

Following the same steps described in method #3 above, “right

click” using your mouse on the article page, select the “ inspect
element” option. You should see the following screen:

Source: Casey Botticello | Black Edge Consulting

Clicking on “Inspect Element” shows you all the information about

a webpage you are current viewing: its source code, the images and
CSS that form its design, the fonts and icons it uses, the Javascript
code that powers animations, and more. You can see how long the
site takes to load, how much bandwidth it used to download, and
the exact color in its text.

This trick to bypass Business Insider Prime’s paywall involves

deleting the code on the page that generates the overlay that blocks
the viewer from viewing an article. The cool thing about this trick is
that it does not involve any illegal hacking. The information is being
readily transmitted by Business Insider. But the article’s text is
largely obscured by a large opaque adwall.

To delete this opaque layer, you need to identify the line(s) of code
that trigger this element. This can be a little tricky depending upon
the site. You can search in the HTML code for obvious key words
related to ads, pop ups, or command prompts that trigger certain
actions.

In the case of the sample Business Insider article, you need to Knd
the CSS layer of code which is speciKcally identiKed by “.tp-modal-
open”.

Adwall Layer on Business Insider Article Page

Select the code below <style type= “text/css”> (this is the adwall
layer) and right click on it, choose “delete node” and close the
“Inspect Element” toolbar. You can now view the article in its
entirety:

Article without Adwall Layer

This method requires a little knowledge of HTML to Knd the correct

line(s) of code to delete or alter. Learning a little HTML can go a
long way!
 . . .

Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have
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Casey Botticello is a partner at Black Edge Consulting. Black Edge

Consulting is a strategic communications Krm, specializing in
online reputation management, digital marketing, and crisis
management. Prior to founding Black Edge Consulting, he worked
for BGR Group, a bipartisan lobbying and strategic communications
Krm.

Casey is the founder of the Cryptocurrency Alliance, an

independent expenditure-only committee (Super PAC) dedicated to
cryptocurrency and blockchain advocacy. He is also the editor of
several Medium publications, including Medium Blogging Guide, K
Street, Strategic Communications, Background Check, Wall Street,
Paywall Hacks, and Escaping the 9 to 5. He is a graduate of The
University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in Urban
Studies.

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