How to Read The Northern Scot and Grampian Online Without a Subscription
The Northern Scot and Grampian Online share the Highland News & Media metered paywall. How it works and how to read a full Moray or Banffshire story.
Paywall behaviour last tested
Highland News & Media, usually shortened to HNM, is the Inverness-based group behind most of the local papers in the north of Scotland. The Northern Scot is its Elgin title and the paper of record for Moray, from the council and the courts to the Highland League. Grampian Online carries the group's Banffshire titles, covering Banff, Buckie, Keith and the coast. Alongside them sit the Inverness Courier, the Ross-shire Journal, the John O'Groat Journal and several more, and every one of them runs on the same website platform with the same subscriber paywall. If you follow a link to a Moray court case or a Buckie Thistle story and land on a subscription prompt, this guide explains what is happening and how to read the full story.
How the Highland News & Media paywall works
The HNM sites use a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can open a limited number of articles before the body of the story is replaced by a prompt to subscribe, and the count is kept in a browser cookie. Some longer features and sport pieces are marked for subscribers from the first visit. Because The Northern Scot, Grampian Online and the rest share one platform, the meter and the gate behave identically across the group.
The gate is applied in the browser. The site delivers the full text of each article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks your cookie and hides the body once you are over the limit. A crawler-style 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.
Our tests on 13 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:
- A 1,014-word Northern Scot sport report on a complete realignment at Buckie Thistle, with staff refusing wages and the manager describing ongoing cutbacks, loaded in full, all 34 paragraphs.
- A 775-word Northern Scot story on a dog rescued from horrific neglect in Moray and its remarkable transformation loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.
- A 310-word Northern Scot court report on a Moray teenager spared jail after police uncovered £13k in cash and a drug stash loaded in full, all 16 paragraphs.
- A 568-word Grampian Online feature on how a Banffshire-born martyr became Scotland's first saint in over 700 years loaded in full, all 15 paragraphs.
- A 194-word Grampian Online court brief on a man sentenced over town centre CCTV footage loaded in full, all 10 paragraphs. It is a short item, and 194 words is the whole of it.
We have not tested the Inverness Courier, the Ross-shire Journal, the John O'Groat Journal or the other HNM titles. They share the platform and the paywall, so they very likely behave the same way, but we only list sites we have confirmed.
Read a Northern Scot or Grampian Online article in full
- Copy the article link. Northern Scot links look like northern-scot.co.uk/news/headline-slug-447071/ and Grampian Online links look like grampianonline.co.uk/news/headline-slug-446896/, each ending in a number.
- 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
- Print editions. The Northern Scot and the Banffshire papers are weeklies, widely sold across Moray and Banffshire, and the print edition carries everything the website locks.
- Library access. Moray and Aberdeenshire library services keep their local papers, and some offer them through PressReader, so it is worth asking at your branch.
- Newsletters. The HNM sites send free email bulletins that summarise the week's stories and link to them.
- Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
- Related free sources. Council agendas, planning applications and committee papers are published free by Moray Council and Aberdeenshire Council, and much of the civic reporting can be traced back to them.
How it compares with other Scottish news
The two Newsquest nationals, The Herald and The National, use a similar browser-side gate and load in full in the same way. The full list of sites that work is kept current.
Subscribe if you read it regularly
The HNM titles are small newsrooms covering places that no national paper visits, and the court, council and Highland League reporting they do exists nowhere else. If you read The Northern Scot or Grampian Online every week, a subscription is the right way to keep that going.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from The Northern Scot and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Does the reader work on the Inverness Courier?
We have not tested it. The Inverness Courier is a Highland News & Media title on the same platform as The Northern Scot and Grampian Online, so it very likely behaves the same way, but we only list sites we have confirmed.
Does the paywall count sport stories?
Yes. Sport reports are ordinary articles on the HNM sites and are metered in the same way as news. A 1,014-word Buckie Thistle report loaded in full in our test.
Why was one Grampian Online story only 194 words?
Because that is the whole story. It was a short court brief about a man sentenced over town centre CCTV footage, and all ten paragraphs came through. The reader returns whatever the page contains, so a brief stays brief.