DH (dhnet.be) Paywall: How to Read DH Articles for Free

DH, published as DH Les Sports+ and still known to many Belgians as La Dernière Heure, is the French-language popular daily of Brussels. It belongs to the IPM group, which also owns La Libre Belgique, and it mixes national news, crime and court reporting, Belgian politics and a sports section that remains one of the biggest draws in French-speaking Belgium. DH is also where many Walloon and Brussels readers follow strikes, public sector pay and the running arguments of federal government, and when a DH story about a national strike day is shared on Facebook, the people clicking it usually run into the DH+ prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the DH paywall works

DH uses a freemium model rather than a classic meter. Short news items and wire stories are free to everyone, while longer reports, interviews and analysis are marked DH+ and reserved for subscribers. On a DH+ article a non-subscriber sees the headline, the opening paragraph or two and then a box inviting them to subscribe. As far as we can tell there is also a soft limit on how many articles a visitor can open before being asked to register, kept in a cookie.

The gate is applied in the browser. The dhnet.be pages carry the article text so that search engines can index it, and a script hides it from visitors without a DH+ session. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the whole article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out the difference and why it matters for a site like this one.

Our tests on 17 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 910-word DH report on a national strike day, with tens of thousands of demonstrators expected in Brussels and the authorities preparing for a tense day, loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
• A 770-word DH piece on "F*ck you flik", a documentary about violence against police officers, loaded in full, all 12 paragraphs.
• A 383-word DH report on capped indexation and "fictitious" pay scales affecting all civil servants loaded in full, all 7 paragraphs. This is a shorter news item, and its length is in line with what the paper published.

Read a DH article in full

• Copy the article link. DH links look like dhnet.be/actu/belgique/2026/10/08/headline-slug-FHY2DBITZRELDFWEU6FMKGTWWY/, with the date in the path and a block of capital letters at the end.
• 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 article is shown in French as DH published it, and your browser's translate function works on the reader page if you want it in English or Dutch.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. DH sends free email newsletters for news and for sport, which summarise the day's main stories and link to them.
• Library access. Many Belgian public libraries and some French and Dutch ones offer DH and La Libre through PressReader, which gives the print edition page by page.
• Private windows. Any registration prompt tied to a cookie can be reset in a private window, although this does not open DH+ articles.
• Related free sources. RTBF and Belga carry the same strike, government and court stories for free, and the federal government publishes the decisions behind pay and indexation news on its own sites.

How it compares with other French-language sites

DH loaded in full on every test, which puts it with the better-behaved freemium sites. Belgian publishers have generally been more cooperative than the big French nationals, several of which block automated requests outright, and DH follows the Belgian pattern. In the same round of tests, the French geopolitics magazine Revue Conflits also passed. The full list of sites that work is kept current, and we add other Belgian titles as they pass.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

DH is a newsroom of modest size covering a small market in a country with two languages and several governments, and DH+ is how it pays for its reporters. If you read its sport or its Belgian news most days, a subscription is the right way to keep that coverage going.