The Daily Sentinel Paywall: How to Read Grand Junction News for Free

The Daily Sentinel is the newspaper of Grand Junction and the largest daily on Colorado's Western Slope, covering Mesa County, the Grand Valley and the wider region between Denver and Utah. It is owned by Seaton Publishing, a family company that has run papers in Kansas and Colorado for generations, which makes it one of the few independent dailies left in the state. It also meters its website, so a link to a county commission vote, a water story or a court case shared across the mountains stops at a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a story in full.

How the Daily Sentinel paywall works

The Sentinel uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can read a limited number of stories a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is swapped for a subscription offer. Obituaries and some public-safety stories are generally left open; the reporting that readers actually share, on land use, energy and local politics, is where the gate lands.

The site runs on a publishing platform used by hundreds of small and mid-sized American papers, and it applies the paywall in the browser. The full article is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then hides it once you are over the limit. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script receives the complete text.

Our tests on 2 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,443-word Daily Sentinel business feature on a Grand Junction frame shop marking forty years loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
• A 1,105-word Daily Sentinel report on Mesa County's moratorium on data centres while it updates its land development code loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs.
• A 507-word Daily Sentinel court story on an appeals ruling that upheld dropped charges loaded in full, all 16 paragraphs.

Read a Daily Sentinel article in full

• Copy the article link. Sentinel links look like gjsentinel.com/news/western_colorado/headline-slug/article_ID.html.
• 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. Mesa County Libraries provide the Sentinel's e-edition and archive to cardholders, and the paper is in several newspaper databases that Colorado libraries license.
• Newsletters. The Sentinel's free daily email carries headlines and links to the day's stories.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Print and digital bundles. As a family-owned paper, the Sentinel leans on subscriptions and often runs introductory digital offers.

Colorado papers compared

The Sentinel behaves like the other Colorado papers we have tested. The Denver Post and the Boulder Daily Camera, both MediaNews Group titles, meter in the browser and load in full. Colorado Politics also returned a full article in an earlier test, though it is not on the home page list. The difference between these and the national titles that do not work is explained in our guide to metered versus hard paywalls, and the full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Independent local papers are rare, and the Sentinel's reporting on water, public lands and energy on the Western Slope is not duplicated anywhere else. If you follow Grand Junction news every week, a subscription is the right way to keep the newsroom staffed.