Mankato Free Press Paywall: How to Read Free Press Articles for Free

The Free Press is the daily newspaper of Mankato and the main source of news for southern Minnesota, covering the city, Blue Earth and Nicollet counties, Minnesota State University and the region's farms and manufacturers. It belongs to CNHI, a chain of more than 70 small and mid-sized papers owned by the Retirement Systems of Alabama, and it runs on the platform CNHI uses across the group. Readers who follow a court case, a downtown development or a MSU game from out of town land on the paywall quickly, and Free Press links are among the local-paper links our readers paste most often. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a story in full.

How the Free Press paywall works

The Free Press 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. The count is per site, so the other CNHI papers in the region each meter separately.

The gate is applied in the browser. CNHI's platform delivers the full article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script hides the text once you are over the limit. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script receives the whole story.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• An 848-word Free Press story on a leaner, more local RibFest staying in downtown Mankato loaded in full, all 26 paragraphs.
• A 332-word Free Press police brief on a theft investigation that led to a drug arrest loaded in full, all 8 paragraphs.

Short crime and court briefs are short in the original too, so a low word count on one of those is not a sign of a teaser. In an earlier pass on 29 September 2026 the same site returned only brief items, which is why it was not listed then; the longer stories in this test settled it.

Read a Free Press article in full

• Copy the article link. Free Press links look like mankatofreepress.com/news/local_news/headline-slug/article_ID.html, and the ID part does not matter.
• 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. Blue Earth County Library and other southern Minnesota libraries carry the Free Press in print and often through a digital newsstand with a library card.
• Newsletters. The paper's free daily headlines email links to the day's stories.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Introductory offers. CNHI papers run regular discounted digital trials, and a subscription includes the e-edition.

How it compares with other Minnesota papers

The Free Press behaves like the larger Minnesota papers we have tested. The Minnesota Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press both meter in the browser and load in full, as does InForum, whose parent company owns several Minnesota dailies. The Gannett papers in the state, including the St. Cloud Times, block automated requests and do not work. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers the difference, and the full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Free Press is one of the few daily newsrooms left in southern Minnesota, and it survives on subscriptions. If it is part of your routine, paying for it is the honest way to keep it going, and the digital rate is modest.