How to Read The Mercury News, Denver Post and Pioneer Press Without a Subscription

MediaNews Group, backed by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, owns more daily newspapers than almost any other company in the United States. Its flagship titles include The Mercury News in San Jose, The Denver Post and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, along with the Boulder Daily Camera, the Orange County Register, the Boston Herald, the New York Daily News and the San Diego Union-Tribune. They all run on one publishing platform with one metered paywall, so this guide covers three of the biggest together. What works for one works for all of them.

How the MediaNews paywall works

Every MediaNews paper uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers 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 allowance is not published and has been reduced over the years. Some breaking news and public-safety stories are left outside the meter.

The platform delivers the complete article in the page so that search engines can index it, and applies the gate with a script that runs in your browser. A crawler-style reader retrieves the whole text. We tested each paper on 28 September 2026:

• A 1,445-word Mercury News story on Californians using the state's data-broker deletion law loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 35 paragraphs.
• A 2,209-word Denver Post guide to Colorado fall festivals and pumpkin patches loaded in full, all 30 paragraphs.
• An 859-word Pioneer Press story on residents' concerns about licence-plate cameras loaded in full, all 19 paragraphs.
• A 1,331-word Boulder Daily Camera story on an arts festival loaded in full, all 33 paragraphs.
• On 29 September 2026, a 1,143-word East Bay Times sports column loaded in full, all 46 paragraphs, as did a 688-word opinion piece on data centres.

Read a story from any MediaNews paper in full

• Copy the article link. MediaNews links share one format: mercurynews.com/2026/09/28/headline-slug/, denverpost.com/2026/09/28/headline-slug/ and twincities.com/2026/09/28/headline-slug/ for the Pioneer Press.
• 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. The San Jose Public Library, Denver Public Library and Saint Paul Public Library each offer free digital access to their local paper with a library card, and many suburban systems do the same.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it.
• E-editions. The print replicas are subscriber-only and not available through any reader tool.

US regional papers compared

• Work in full: every MediaNews paper we tested, plus the Seattle Times and Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and more regional dailies.
• Blocked: the Gannett and USA Today Network papers, which are MediaNews's main rival chain, refuse automated requests across the board.
• Bot challenge: San Francisco Chronicle and Dallas Morning News.
• Teaser only: The Washington Post.

In the Twin Cities, the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune both load in full, so either paper works. The complete list is in every site you can read for free, and metered versus hard paywalls explains the difference.

Support the papers if you read them often

MediaNews papers have been cut harder than most, and the reporters who remain are covering cities that would otherwise have no daily coverage at all. Introductory digital offers are usually a dollar a week or less. If one of these is your local paper, a subscription is the right way to keep it going.