News & Star Paywall: How to Read Carlisle and Cumbria News for Free

The News & Star is the daily paper for Carlisle and north Cumbria, and its website is where the city's court cases, council rows and Carlisle United news break. It is a Newsquest title, part of the group that also owns The Herald and The National in Scotland, the Cumberland News and around 200 other local papers, and it shares the group's paywall. Readers following a Cumbrian story from elsewhere run into the meter quickly. This guide explains how it works and how to read a News & Star article in full.

How the News & Star paywall works

The News & Star uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a limited number of articles a month, counted in a browser cookie, before the story is replaced by a subscription prompt. Newsquest sets the allowance centrally and adjusts it, 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 delivers the full 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 complete story. That is exactly how The National and the Newsquest regional dailies behave.

One honest note on length. Most News & Star web stories are short, often a single court report of a few hundred words, so a full article from the reader will not be long. What matters is that every paragraph arrives rather than the first two followed by a subscription box.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 404-word News & Star court report on a jail sentence for a former Carlisle man loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
• A 263-word News & Star court report on a curfew breach loaded in full, all 11 paragraphs.
• A 222-word News & Star story on a teenager banned from the city centre loaded in full, all 9 paragraphs.

Read a News & Star article in full

• Copy the article link. News & Star links look like newsandstar.co.uk/news/12345678.headline-slug/, with the numeric id before the headline, the same pattern as every Newsquest site.
• 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

• Library access. Cumberland Council libraries offer the News & Star and the Cumberland News through PressReader, free with a library card.
• Newsletters. The paper's free daily email carries the main stories and links.
• 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 is not available through any reader.

The News & Star and the rest of Newsquest

Because the platform is shared, the News & Star behaves like every other Newsquest title we have tested, from The Herald and The National to the Bournemouth Echo and the Eastern Daily Press. If a Newsquest link fails, it is almost always a temporary fetch problem rather than a change of paywall; try again a minute later. The full list of sites that work has the rest of the UK regional press, and our guide to metered versus hard paywalls explains why the National World papers, such as The Scotsman, do not work.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The News & Star is one of the few daily papers left in a large rural county, and it still sends reporters to the crown court and the council chamber. Digital subscriptions are a few pounds a month on introductory terms. If it is where you keep up with Carlisle, subscribing is the honest way to keep it doing that.