Anchorage Daily News Paywall: How to Read ADN Articles for Free

The Anchorage Daily News is Alaska's largest newspaper and the paper of record for a state whose politics gets more national attention than its population would suggest. It has been owned by the Binkley family, with Ryan Binkley as publisher, since 2017, when the family bought it out of bankruptcy from Alice Rogoff. In July 2024 it cut its print edition to two days a week while keeping a six-day e-paper, a decision that said a lot about where its readers had gone: print subscriptions were under 5,000 at that point, and paid digital subscriptions were about 19,000. The stories that travel furthest, the Senate race coverage, the energy explainers and the investigations, are the ones most likely to carry a For Subscribers label, so a reader arriving from a link on social media often meets the membership prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Anchorage Daily News paywall works

ADN runs a subscriber model rather than a simple meter. Stories on the home page carry a "For Subscribers" label, and the article pages' metadata declares them not free to read (the isAccessibleForFree flag is set to false). A digital membership gives full access to adn.com, the apps and the e-Edition, and home-delivery subscribers get it included with the paper. We have not confirmed the current price, so we are not quoting one here; the subscribe page has the live figure.

The gate is applied in the browser. The full article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a member and replaces the body with the membership box if you are not. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete story. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and ADN, despite the subscriber-only labels, sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 1 November 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,401-word Anchorage Daily News politics report on a New York Times story that Mary Peltola's campaign and national Democrats helped get Senator Dan Sullivan's namesake challenger onto the ballot loaded in full, all 64 paragraphs.
• A 1,538-word Anchorage Daily News energy explainer on Donald Trump calling the Alaska LNG pipeline a "federal government project", and what that means, loaded in full, all 52 paragraphs.
• A 1,233-word Anchorage Daily News report on the Justice Department issuing new subpoenas over the Alaska Senate candidate controversy loaded in full, all 29 paragraphs.

Read an Anchorage Daily News article in full

• Copy the article link. ADN links look like adn.com/politics/2026/10/28/ followed by the headline slug and a closing slash, with the section name changing for business, Alaska news or sport.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the article as ADN published it, without the membership prompt, the ads or the sidebar. Photo captions and embedded documents may not carry across, so for a story built around a court filing it is worth opening the original as well.

Other approaches

• Library access. Many Alaska libraries offer digital newspaper access to cardholders, and that often includes the local daily. Ask at the desk or check the library's online resources page.
• The e-paper. ADN's six-day e-paper is part of the digital membership, so it is not a free route, but if you already take home delivery you are entitled to it and may not have activated it.
• Related free sources. A great deal of what ADN reports on is documented in public. The Alaska Legislature publishes bills, committee schedules and recordings, the Alaska Division of Elections publishes candidate filings and results, and court records are available through the state court system. Alaska Public Media, the public radio network, is free and covers the same statewide stories.
• Private windows will not help. Because ADN uses a subscriber model rather than a monthly meter, there is no article count to reset. Opening a For Subscribers story in a private window shows the same prompt.

How it compares with other US regional papers

Regional dailies in the United States have gone several different ways on paywalls, and the outcome for a reader depends on which group owns the paper. ADN behaves like most of the independently owned and family owned regionals we have tested: the text is in the page and only a script hides it. The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the Forum Communications flagship, works the same way, as do the MediaNews titles covered in our Mercury News, Denver Post and Pioneer Press guide and the pair in our Seattle Times and Star Tribune guide. The exceptions are worth knowing about. Gannett's USA Today network papers block the reader outright, The Baltimore Sun returns previews rather than full stories, and the national titles, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, do not work at all. Our explainer on sites that cannot be read covers what to do instead, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Alaska is a state with one major daily newspaper, and that paper has already been through bankruptcy once. ADN's roughly 19,000 digital subscribers are what keeps a statehouse reporter in Juneau and an investigations desk in Anchorage. If you follow the Senate race, the pipeline debate or the courts through adn.com every week, a digital membership is the right way to keep that reporting going, and it unlocks the apps and the e-Edition as well.