How to Read The National (Scotland) and Other Newsquest Papers for Free

The National was launched in 2014, in the weeks after the Scottish independence referendum, as the only daily newspaper to back a Yes vote. It shares an owner, a newsroom building and a website platform with The Herald, and it shares The Herald's paywall too. If you follow Scottish politics from outside Scotland, you will have run into it. This guide explains how the paywall works on The National and on the wider Newsquest group of local papers, and how to read any of their articles in full.

How The National paywall works

The National runs a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a limited number of free articles a month, counted in a cookie, before the article body is replaced with a subscription prompt. The allowance is not fixed and Newsquest adjusts it across its titles, so assume it is small. A digital subscription removes the meter and includes the e-edition.

The site is built on Newsquest's shared platform, which serves the complete article in the page so that search engines can index it and then hides the text with a script in the browser. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script gets the full story. This is exactly how The Herald behaves, and the mechanism is explained in our guide to metered versus hard paywalls.

In our test on 28 September 2026, an 888-word National news story about an assault at a political party conference loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 41 paragraphs.

The rest of the Newsquest group

Newsquest owns around 200 local and regional titles across Britain, and they all run on the same platform with the same metering. We tested three of the larger ones on the same day:

• The Argus (Brighton): an 831-word local news story loaded in full, all 46 paragraphs.
• Bournemouth Echo: a 624-word crime report loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
• Eastern Daily Press (Norfolk): a 694-word opinion column loaded in full, all 37 paragraphs.

Because the platform is shared, the other Newsquest titles, from the Oxford Mail and the Northern Echo to the Glasgow Times and the Lancashire Telegraph, should behave the same way. If one does not, it is most likely a temporary fetch problem rather than a change of paywall; try again a minute later.

Read a National or Newsquest article in full

• Copy the article link. The National's links look like thenational.scot/news/12345678.headline-slug/, and the local papers follow the same pattern on their own domains.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The article appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

Other approaches

• Library access. Scottish public libraries widely offer The National and The Herald through PressReader, and English libraries usually carry their local Newsquest title the same way. It is free with a library card.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• The e-edition. The page-by-page digital edition is subscriber-only and not available through any reader.

How it compares with other Scottish and UK papers

The National and The Herald both load in full. The Scotsman, owned by a different group, blocks automated requests and does not work. Among the UK nationals, The Times and The i Paper work, while The Telegraph does not. The full picture is in our list of every site you can read for free.

Support the paper if you read it daily

The National is a small paper with a committed readership, and it exists because that readership pays for it. Digital subscriptions are a few pounds a month on introductory terms. If it is part of your morning, subscribing is the right way to keep it going, and the same goes for whichever local Newsquest title covers your town.