Mail & Guardian Paywall: How to Read Mail & Guardian Articles for Free

The Mail & Guardian is the Johannesburg weekly that began life in 1985 as the Weekly Mail, founded by journalists from the recently closed Rand Daily Mail, and took its present name after Britain's Guardian bought into it in the 1990s. It is best known for investigative reporting: for years it housed amaBhungane, the investigative unit that has since become an independent non-profit, and its Friday front page is still the one South African politicians least want to see. The print edition is weekly, the website publishes daily, and the stories that travel furthest, the political exposés, the court reporting and the Green Guardian environmental coverage, are the ones most likely to meet a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Mail & Guardian paywall works

The Mail & Guardian runs a metered subscriber paywall. As far as we can tell non-subscribers can open a limited number of articles before the body of the next one is replaced by a subscription prompt, and some pieces are marked for subscribers from the first visit. The count is kept in a browser cookie, and a subscription removes it.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks the cookie and hides the body if you are over the limit. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and the Mail & Guardian sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 22 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,101-word Mail & Guardian Green Guardian report on the City of Tshwane admitting negligence after it supplied unchlorinated water to Bronkhorstspruit for three weeks and 408 people fell ill, loaded in full, all 36 paragraphs.
• An 847-word Mail & Guardian report on National Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola resuming his duties after President Cyril Ramaphosa lifted his suspension and the NPA withdrew charges in the Medicare24 case, loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.
• A 701-word Mail & Guardian court report on former deputy national police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya being denied bail by a Randburg magistrate over fears of witness tampering, loaded in full, all 24 paragraphs.

Read a Mail & Guardian article in full

• Copy the article link. Mail & Guardian links look like mg.co.za/news/south-africa/2026-10-20-headline-slug/, with the date at the start of the final segment, and Green Guardian pieces sit under mg.co.za/the-green-guardian/.
• 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.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. The Mail & Guardian sends free email newsletters that summarise the day's and the week's stories and link to them.
• Library access. As far as we can tell the Mail & Guardian is carried on PressReader, which many public libraries in South Africa, the UK and North America offer free to cardholders.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets the count, though subscriber-only pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. amaBhungane publishes its investigations free on its own site, GroundUp and the Daily Maverick are free to read, court judgments are on SAFLII and parliamentary committee records are on the Parliamentary Monitoring Group's site.

How it compares with other South African news sites

The other South African titles we have tested behave much the same way. News24, the country's largest news site, works through the reader, and so do the Arena Holdings titles covered in our guide to the Sunday Times and the Sowetan. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Mail & Guardian is a small newsroom by international standards and funds investigations that take months and attract lawsuits. If you read it every Friday, a subscription is the right way to keep that reporting going.