How to Read News24 Without a Subscription

News24 is the largest news site in South Africa and the flagship of Media24, with a newsroom that covers politics, business, courts and sport nationally. Since 2020 it has put its in-depth journalism behind a subscription, and readers at home and in the diaspora hit the lock on exactly the stories they most want to read. This guide explains how the News24 paywall works and how to read a subscriber-only article in full without a subscription.

The locked stories are the ones that matter most: the investigations into state contracts and municipal finances, the court reporting and the political analysis that the free wire copy only summarises. Readers outside South Africa are affected most, because the subscription is billed in rand through local payment routes that are awkward from abroad.

How the News24 paywall works

News24 uses a freemium model rather than a meter. Breaking news, wire copy and much of the daily coverage is free. Investigations, analysis, columns and long-form features are marked as subscriber-only and show a subscription prompt in place of the article body. There is no monthly count to reset; a locked story is locked on the first view.

The lock is applied in the browser. News24 depends heavily on search traffic, so the full article text is delivered in the page HTML for Google to index, and a script decides whether to display it or the subscription panel. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the whole story.

In our test on 28 September 2026, a 1,064-word News24 politics story about misconduct allegations against a former minister loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 45 paragraphs.

Read a News24 article in full

• Copy the article link. News24 links look like news24.com/politics/headline-slug-20251114, with the section first and a date at the end.
• 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.

The other Media24 titles, including Netwerk24 in Afrikaans and the regional papers, are published on related platforms. We tested News24 only, so paste a link from the others to check.

If a link opens for you in full, it was a free story to begin with. If you see the subscription panel, it is one of the locked ones and the reader is the quickest way to read it.

Other approaches

• Free coverage. News24 leaves most breaking news free, and the locked pieces are usually the analysis that follows. Daily Maverick, GroundUp and the Mail & Guardian cover much of the same ground with lighter or no paywalls.
• Newsletters. News24's free newsletters summarise the day's main stories with links.
• Library and university access. South African university libraries commonly provide access to News24 and to the Media24 archive through Sabinet or PressReader, and some public libraries do the same.
• Private windows. Because News24 locks stories individually rather than counting reads, a private window does not help.

How it compares with papers elsewhere

News24 follows the freemium model rather than the meter, which puts it alongside The Independent and other sites that lock specific stories, and unlike the metered Irish Times or The Times. In each case the full text is served for indexing, which is why the reader works. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out the distinction and why some sites cannot be read at all.

Subscribe if you read it daily

News24's subscription is priced for the South African market and funds one of the few large investigative newsrooms left in the country. If its reporting is part of your day, subscribing is the right way to keep it going.