Berkshire Eagle and Bennington Banner Paywalls: How to Read New England Newspapers Titles for Free
The Berkshire Eagle and Bennington Banner meter their sites on one shared platform. How the New England Newspapers paywall works and how to read a full story.
Paywall behaviour last tested
The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and the Bennington Banner across the state line in Vermont belong to New England Newspapers Inc., the locally owned group that bought them back from a national chain in 2016 and has since rebuilt their newsrooms. The Eagle covers the Berkshires, Tanglewood, Williams College and Massachusetts politics; the Banner covers southern Vermont. Both sit on the same publishing platform with the same metered paywall, so a link to either stops at a subscription prompt after a handful of stories. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article from either paper.
How the Berkshire Eagle paywall works
The Eagle and the Banner use a metered paywall. A non-subscriber can open a limited number of articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. The allowance is not published and the group adjusts it from time to time. Some pieces, notably investigations and columns, are marked subscriber-only from the first view.
The gate is applied in the browser. The platform delivers the complete article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then hides the text once you are over the limit or if the story is flagged for subscribers. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script receives the whole story. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls explains why that choice is what makes a reader work.
Our tests on 10 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 1,384-word Berkshire Eagle report on UMass football's first win over a Power Four team loaded in full, all 46 paragraphs.
- A 980-word Berkshire Eagle column on the midterm elections seen from New York City loaded in full, all 12 paragraphs.
- A 601-word Berkshire Eagle crime story on a Bennington man accused of buying guns for Massachusetts dealers loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
The Banner was tested on 8 October 2026:
- A 646-word Bennington Banner report on a Mount Anthony football shutout loaded in full, all 17 paragraphs.
- A 386-word Bennington Banner story on a grant for a nursing-assistant training hub loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.
The group's other papers, the Brattleboro Reformer and the Manchester Journal, run on the same platform and should behave the same way, but we have not tested them.
Read a Berkshire Eagle or Bennington Banner article in full
- Copy the article link. Eagle links look like berkshireeagle.com/section/headline-slug/article_ID.html, and Banner links follow the same pattern on benningtonbanner.com, often with social sharing parameters attached.
- Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article. The sharing parameters do not matter.
- The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text.
Other approaches
- Library access. Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield and several Vermont libraries offer the papers digitally with a library card, and both are on NewsBank through many library systems.
- Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it for the metered stories, though not for the subscriber-only ones.
- Newsletters. Both papers run free morning newsletters with the day's headlines and links.
- Introductory offers. New England Newspapers runs regular low-cost digital trials.
New England papers compared
Both titles behave like the region's other metered dailies. The Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald load in full the same way. The Gannett papers in the region, including the Cape Cod Times and the Providence Journal, are less reliable: their bot protection blocks the reader on most requests, so they are not listed. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
The Eagle and the Banner are a rare case of local papers brought back into local ownership and invested in, and subscriptions are what pay for that. If one of them is your local paper, a digital subscription is the right way to keep it reporting.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The Berkshire Eagle and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
How many free articles do the Berkshire Eagle and Bennington Banner allow?
The group does not publish a fixed allowance and changes it from time to time. Most readers see the subscription prompt after a few stories in a month, and some pieces are locked for subscribers from the first view.
Are the two papers under the same owner?
Yes. Both belong to New England Newspapers Inc., which also owns the Brattleboro Reformer and the Manchester Journal in Vermont. All four share one platform and paywall.
Does the reader work on subscriber-only stories?
Yes. The subscriber-only flag is applied in the browser and the full text is present in the page, so the reader returns the whole article whether or not it is marked for subscribers.