Berliner Zeitung Paywall: How to Read B+ Articles for Free
Berliner Zeitung puts its interviews, essays and media criticism behind a B+ label. How the paywall works, what it costs and how to read a full article.
Paywall behaviour last tested
Berliner Zeitung is a Berlin daily founded in 1945 and published by Berliner Verlag, which has been owned since 2019 by the entrepreneurs Holger and Silke Friedrich. Under their ownership the paper has leaned into long interviews, opinion and media criticism alongside its city reporting, and it is those pieces, rather than the day's routine news, that carry the B+ label marking them as subscriber-only. A reader arriving from a search result or a shared link to a B+ interview or essay meets the subscription prompt after the first few lines. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.
How the Berliner Zeitung paywall works
Berliner Zeitung runs a freemium paywall. Most breaking news and short reports are open to everyone. Stories marked B+, which include the longer interviews, essays, columns and media criticism, are reserved for subscribers, and each of those pages declares that it is not accessible for free. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out the different models, and Berliner Zeitung sits in the freemium camp: a clear split between open and closed articles rather than a counter.
The gate is enforced in the browser. The B+ article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then hides the body and shows the subscription box to anyone who is not logged in. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article.
Our tests on 3 November 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 1,094-word Berliner Zeitung interview with the Berlin author Zelal Yeşilyurt, on how the internet has changed since her childhood, loaded in full, all 29 paragraphs.
- A 521-word Berliner Zeitung report on the Länder planning a media quota that favours ARD and ZDF loaded in full, all 16 paragraphs.
- A 1,805-word Berliner Zeitung media-criticism essay "Von wichtigen und unwichtigen Opfern", on which victims the leading media devote their attention to, loaded in full, all 38 paragraphs.
Read a Berliner Zeitung article in full
- Copy the article link. Berliner Zeitung links look like berliner-zeitung.de/article/ followed by the headline slug and a numeric id, for example berliner-zeitung.de/article/headline-slug-10515589.
- 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 in German, exactly as Berliner Zeitung published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.
Other approaches
- Free articles. A large share of the paper's daily output is not marked B+ and can be read on berliner-zeitung.de without an account, so check for the label before reaching for anything else.
- Private windows. These do not help with B+ pieces. The split between open and closed articles is fixed per story rather than counted in a cookie, so a fresh window shows the same prompt.
- Related free sources. Berlin's Senate and the Abgeordnetenhaus publish press releases, documents and plenary records free of charge, and for media-policy stories such as the ARD and ZDF quota the Länder's own broadcasting commission documents are public. The facts behind a B+ report can often be checked against them.
How it compares with other German news sites
Berliner Zeitung joins a modest group of German-language subscription sites that pass our tests. The others that work include Burda's magazine site Focus+, the weekly Der Freitag, the reader-funded Krautreporter and the Heidelberg regional Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. In Austria, Die Presse and Kurier both work as well.
The national heavyweights do not. Spiegel+, Bild+, FAZ, Handelsblatt, Welt, Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung all fail, returning teasers or blocking the reader, so there is no guide for any of them. Berlin's other dailies, Tagesspiegel and Berliner Morgenpost, have not been tested, so we make no claim about them either way. Our page on sites that cannot be bypassed covers what to do about the blocked titles, and the full list of sites that work is kept current.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
Berliner Zeitung is a city paper with a national voice, and its interviews and essays take time to produce. On 3 November 2026 the digital subscription covering all B+ content cost €9.99 a month, with an introductory offer of €2 a month for the first three months, which the paper advertises as 50 cents a week. Digital Plus, which adds the e-paper edition, costs €35 a month after a €9.99 introductory price for the first three months. If you read B+ pieces every week, one of those is the right way to keep them coming.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Berliner Zeitung and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
What does B+ mean on Berliner Zeitung?
B+ is the label Berliner Zeitung puts on subscriber-only articles. The longer interviews, essays, columns and media-criticism pieces usually carry it, while most routine news stays free to read.
Does the reader work on B+ articles?
Yes. All three B+ articles in our 3 November 2026 tests, including a 1,805-word media-criticism essay, loaded in full. The text is delivered in the page and hidden by a script, which the reader does not run.
How much does a Berliner Zeitung subscription cost?
On 3 November 2026 the digital subscription cost €9.99 a month, with an introductory rate of €2 a month for the first three months. Digital Plus, which includes the e-paper, costs €35 a month after a €9.99 three-month introductory price.