Press Gazette Paywall: How to Read Press Gazette Articles for Free

Press Gazette is the trade title of the British news business. Founded in 1965 as a journal for journalists and editors, it is now online-only and belongs to Progressive Media Investments Ltd, the privately owned group of Mike Danson, who also owns the New Statesman. It is best known, a little ironically given the subject of this guide, for its coverage of paywalls and subscriptions: the "100k Club" ranking of publishers with more than 100,000 digital subscribers, its regular newspaper circulation tables, and the British Journalism Awards it runs each year. Anyone who works in or around journalism ends up on pressgazette.co.uk sooner or later, and since late 2024 the second visit of the month has usually been met by a form asking for an email address, a company and a job title. This guide explains how that gate works and how to read a full article.

How the Press Gazette paywall works

Press Gazette has two layers. The first is a registration wall, in place since December 2024. After one article a month, readers have to give an email address, their company and their job title before they can carry on; the system behind it is provided by Flip-Pay. The second layer, added in May 2025, is a metered paywall on top. Once the registered allowance is used up, the site asks for a full subscription, which costs £99 a year and includes entry to the Future of Media Awards and the British Journalism Awards. Students and retired journalists pay £1.99 a month.

Both layers are applied in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then decides whether to show that text or to replace it with the registration or subscription box. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does, and does not run the script, receives the whole article. Press Gazette does add one further obstacle: it blocks automated fetches from most networks, and our own test machine gets an HTTP 403 error when it asks for a page directly. Skip the Paywall's reader was not affected, and every article we tried loaded in full. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why a gate enforced in the browser behaves so differently from one enforced on the publisher's server.

Our tests on 1 November 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 5,932-word Press Gazette "100k Club" 2025 ranking of the world's biggest news publishers by digital subscribers loaded in full, all 227 paragraphs, much of it tables.
• An 858-word Press Gazette report on 2026 US newspaper circulations, in which The Villages Daily Sun was the only one of the 50 biggest print titles to grow, loaded in full, all 26 paragraphs.
• A 340-word Press Gazette news story on The Canary suspending operations after a second bank account was blocked loaded in full, all 12 paragraphs.

Read a Press Gazette article in full

• Copy the article link. Press Gazette links look like pressgazette.co.uk/ followed by a section name and then the headline as a 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 full text. For the data pieces the tables come through too, which is usually the part you were after.

Other approaches

• Free newsletters. Press Gazette's own email newsletters are free and carry the day's headlines with links back to the site. If you only want to keep an eye on the industry, they cover a lot of ground on their own.
• Register once. The first layer only asks for an email address, a company and a job title. If you read the occasional piece and do not mind being on a marketing list, registering gets you through the first wall and into the metered allowance.
• Private windows. As far as we can tell the one-article count is kept in your browser, so a private window starts it afresh, although the subscription meter behind it is the harder of the two layers and you will reach it again.
• Go to the source. Much of what Press Gazette reports is built on public data. ABC publishes its circulation releases free, Ofcom publishes its news consumption research free, and the 100k Club figures are drawn from publishers' own results and announcements.

How it compares with other trade titles

Trade and industry publications are, as a group, among the paywalls most likely to work in a crawler-style reader, because they rely on search traffic to reach a professional audience and keep their text in the page. Press Gazette joins a list that already includes Music Business Worldwide, The Fashion Law and The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and two more trade sites tested on the same day as Press Gazette, the sports-business site Sportico and the US trade title Restaurant Business, also passed. The contrast is with the national business press that Press Gazette itself writes about. The Financial Times and The Economist, the kind of publishers whose subscriber numbers Press Gazette reports on, enforce their paywalls on the server and do not work, and nor do The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal; our guide to sites that cannot be read this way explains what to do instead. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Press Gazette is a small newsroom covering an industry that is not short of bad news, and its circulation and subscription reporting is the kind of work nobody else does in the UK. If you check it most days, £99 a year is modest for a trade subscription, and it comes with awards entries that many readers in the industry will use anyway. Students and retired journalists pay £1.99 a month, which is cheaper than a coffee.