InForum Paywall: How to Read The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead for Free

InForum is the website of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the largest newspaper in North Dakota and the flagship of Forum Communications, a family-owned chain that also runs the Duluth News Tribune, the Grand Forks Herald, the Jamestown Sun, the Brainerd Dispatch and dozens of smaller papers across the upper Midwest. All of them meter their sites the same way, and InForum links from readers following North Dakota politics, Bison football or a local court case land on the paywall quickly. This guide explains how it works and how to read a full story.

How the InForum paywall works

InForum uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a limited number of articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Some stories, particularly columns and investigations, are flagged as subscriber-only from the first view.

Forum Communications runs all of its papers on one platform. The full article is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and the gate is applied by a script in your browser. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does receives the whole text. Our tests on 29 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,237-word InForum court report from a murder trial loaded in full, all 38 paragraphs.
• A 1,095-word InForum story on Fargo's 2027 city budget loaded in full, all 40 paragraphs.
• An 809-word InForum subscriber-only column on a nonprofit's spending loaded in full, all 20 paragraphs.

Read an InForum article in full

• Copy the article link. InForum links look like inforum.com/news/fargo/headline-slug, and the other Forum Communications papers follow the same pattern on their own domains.
• 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. Fargo Public Library and many North Dakota and Minnesota libraries offer free digital access to their local Forum Communications paper with a library card, and The Forum is on PressReader.
• Private windows. The monthly meter is cookie-based and resets in a private window, though subscriber-only stories stay locked.
• Newsletters. InForum's free daily email carries the headlines and links.
• Introductory offers. Forum Communications routinely offers digital subscriptions for a dollar for the first months.

Upper Midwest papers compared

• Work in full: InForum and the Forum Communications papers, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
• Blocked: the Gannett papers, which in the region include the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the St. Cloud Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, refuse automated requests.

Support the paper if you read it often

Forum Communications is one of the last family-owned chains and has kept newsrooms open in towns where the national chains have closed them. If The Forum is a daily read, a subscription is the direct way to keep that going.