How to Read NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune Without a Subscription

NOLA.com is the website of The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate, which merged in 2019 to form a single daily for New Orleans and, through sister editions in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Acadiana, most of south Louisiana. It is the paper that won Pulitzers for its Hurricane Katrina coverage and it remains the main source on the Saints, the LSU Tigers, Louisiana politics, the oil and gas industry and the criminal justice system in Orleans Parish. The site meters its stories, so readers elsewhere quickly meet the subscription screen. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the NOLA.com paywall works

NOLA.com uses a metered paywall. Visitors without a subscription get a limited number of free articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced with a subscription prompt. The paper does not publish the exact allowance. Storm and emergency coverage is usually left open, as is typical for Gulf Coast papers during hurricane season.

The mechanism is the standard one for metered newspapers. The complete article is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script in your browser applies the gate. A crawler-style reader retrieves the whole text. In our test on 28 September 2026, a 976-word NOLA.com story on candidates disqualified from local elections loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 37 paragraphs.

Read a NOLA.com story in full

• Copy the article link. NOLA.com links look like nola.com/news/headline-slug/article_xxxxxxxx.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.

The Baton Rouge and Acadiana editions of The Advocate live on theadvocate.com and share the same platform, so the same steps should work there.

Other approaches

• Library access. The New Orleans Public Library and several parish library systems offer free digital access to The Times-Picayune and The Advocate with a library card, often including the e-edition.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it. The allowance is small.
• The e-edition. The print replica is subscriber-only, except where a library provides it.

Southern papers compared

• Work in full: NOLA.com, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Post and Courier, Kansas City Star and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
• Blocked: the Gannett papers across the South, including the Tallahassee Democrat, the Montgomery Advertiser and the Clarion Ledger, refuse automated requests. al.com, the Advance Local site for Alabama, was blocked in every test.
• Bot challenge: The Dallas Morning News.

Nationally, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times and Star Tribune also load in full, while The Washington Post serves only a teaser. The complete list is in every site you can read for free, and metered versus hard paywalls explains why the categories differ.

Support the paper if you read it often

The Times-Picayune and The Advocate are locally owned, which is rare for a metro daily, and their newsroom depends on subscriptions rather than a corporate parent. Introductory digital offers usually run at a dollar a week or less. If it is part of your daily routine, that is the right way to keep it going.