Read Paywalled Newspaper Articles
by Bill Farmer.
Categories:
Hacking
.
Most mainstream newspapers show a teaser front page on their web site, but hide most of their content behind a paywall. As with most things you can think of, there is a browser extension for this – Bypass Paywalls.
However this does not work for all newspapers, the extension appears to have dropped support for The Times, for example. It is still possible to read some articles by making use of a search engine to find another source for the text of the item. To do this:
- Click on the link for the article, you will see the first paragraph or so, with the rest not available without an account.
- Double click on the title of the article to select all of the text.
- Right click on the selected title to pop up a context menu, then select ‘Search <search engine> for “Title of Article”’.
- From the results, if it appears, select the result that begins ‘https://epaper.<newspaper url>…’.
- A page will appear that shows the text of the article as a single block of text, difficult to read.
- Use the reader view feature of the browser to read the article. This, in the current Firefox, is a button in the toolbar.
Update
If this doesn’t work, I have since discovered a site, archive.today, that archives Times articles and probably others as well. Copy the URL of the article and paste it into the search box of the site and click the search button.
