The Gazette (Cedar Rapids) Paywall: How to Read Gazette Articles for Free
The Gazette in Cedar Rapids meters its site and locks eastern Iowa news after a few stories. How its paywall works and how to read a full Gazette article free.
Paywall behaviour last tested
The Gazette is the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids and the main source of news for eastern Iowa, covering Linn and Johnson counties, the University of Iowa, the state legislature in Des Moines and the Iowa caucuses every four years. It is owned by Folience, an employee-owned company, which makes it one of the few metro dailies in the Midwest that does not belong to a national chain. It is also a subscription product, and links to Gazette stories about county zoning fights, utility rate cases and Hawkeye sport run into the paywall quickly. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a Gazette story in full.
How the Gazette paywall works
The Gazette uses a metered paywall. A non-subscriber can open a limited number of stories a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Some pieces, particularly investigations and columns, are marked as subscriber-only and gate on the first view.
Like most regional papers, The Gazette runs on a shared publishing platform that delivers the full article in the page so that search engines can index it. The gate is then applied by a script in your browser. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does, and never runs that script, receives the complete text.
Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 1,802-word Gazette report on a Linn County planning and zoning decision about a proposed development loaded in full, all 115 paragraphs.
- A 1,234-word Gazette state story on a utility's plans for new gas generation in Iowa, and the groups challenging it, loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
Read a Gazette article in full
- Copy the article link. Gazette links look like thegazette.com/news/local/headline-slug/article_ID.html, and the ID part does not matter.
- 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 body text.
Other approaches
- Library access. Cedar Rapids Public Library and other eastern Iowa libraries offer The Gazette through PressReader or a similar digital newsstand with a library card. Ask your branch which service it uses.
- Newsletters. The Gazette's free daily and weekly newsletters carry summaries and links to the day's stories.
- Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it.
- Introductory offers. The Gazette runs regular low-cost digital trials, and a subscription includes the e-edition.
How it compares with other Midwest papers
The Gazette behaves like the other regional papers we have tested. InForum in Fargo and the Minnesota Star Tribune meter in the browser in the same way and load in full, and so does the Chicago Tribune. The Gannett papers in Iowa, including the Des Moines Register, block automated requests and do not work. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why that difference matters, and the full list of sites that work is kept up to date.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
The Gazette is employee-owned and has kept a real newsroom in Cedar Rapids while many similar cities have lost theirs. If it is part of your routine, a subscription is the honest way to keep it going, and the digital rate is modest for a metro daily.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The Gazette (Cedar Rapids) and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
How many free articles does The Gazette allow?
The Gazette does not publish a fixed allowance and adjusts it from time to time. Most readers see the subscription prompt after a few stories in a month, sooner for subscriber-only pieces.
Who owns The Gazette in Cedar Rapids?
The Gazette is owned by Folience, an employee-owned company based in Cedar Rapids. It is not part of Gannett or any other national newspaper chain.
Does the reader work on the Des Moines Register too?
No. The Des Moines Register is a Gannett paper and blocks automated requests, so only an error comes back. The Gazette delivers its full article in the page and loads in full.