Port City Daily Paywall: How to Read Wilmington News for Free

Port City Daily is a digital-only newsroom covering Wilmington and the surrounding counties of south-eastern North Carolina: New Hanover, Brunswick and Pender. It has no print edition and makes its money from subscriptions, so most of its reporting on county government, development fights, school boards and the coast is locked to non-subscribers from the start. If someone has shared a Port City Daily link in a neighbourhood group or on social media, the odds are it opened to a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read the story in full.

How the Port City Daily paywall works

Port City Daily uses a subscriber paywall rather than a monthly meter. A non-subscriber sees the headline and the opening lines of most stories, then a panel asking them to subscribe. A limited number of stories, often breaking news and public-safety updates, are left open to everyone.

The gate is applied in the browser. The site publishes the full article text in the page so that search engines can index it and so that subscribers see it immediately, and a script then hides the body from anyone without a subscriber login. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does receives the complete article.

Our tests on 2 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,324-word Port City Daily report on a waterline grant delayed after Pender County leaders failed to form a quorum loaded in full, all 34 paragraphs.
• An 815-word Port City Daily story on New Hanover's county manager intervening again over a development's site plans loaded in full, all 20 paragraphs.
• A 652-word Port City Daily report on both county parties backing a school bond loaded in full, all 14 paragraphs.

Read a Port City Daily article in full

• Copy the article link. Port City Daily links look like portcitydaily.com/latest-news/2026/10/01/headline-slug/.
• 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

• Newsletters. The site's free daily email carries a summary of each day's stories, and it is the best way to follow the headlines without a subscription.
• Open stories. Breaking news and some public-interest coverage are published outside the paywall, so check the article before assuming it is locked.
• Reduced-price subscriptions. As a small independent newsroom, Port City Daily runs introductory offers and occasionally opens the site during emergencies such as hurricanes.
• Private windows. These do not help here, because the gate is not a cookie-based meter.

Wilmington and Carolina news compared

Wilmington's traditional daily, the StarNews, is a Gannett paper, and the Gannett network blocks automated requests inconsistently, so it is not on our list. Across the state line, The Post and Courier in Charleston meters in the browser and loads in full. Port City Daily has more in common with The Baltimore Banner, another digital-native local newsroom funded by subscribers whose articles load in full. The reasons some paywalls can be read around and others cannot are covered in our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls, and the full list of sites that work is updated as we test more.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Port City Daily exists only because Wilmington readers pay for it. There is no print advertising or chain owner behind it, and a subscription costs less than most metro papers. If you follow New Hanover, Brunswick or Pender county news every week, subscribing is the honest way to keep the newsroom going.