Racket Paywall: How to Read Racket Minneapolis Articles for Free

Racket is the Minneapolis news and culture site that filled the hole left when the alt-weekly City Pages closed in 2020. Four of the paper's former editors launched racketmn.com in 2021 as a worker-owned company, and it has kept the City Pages mix ever since: Twin Cities politics, restaurants, music, the State Fair, suburban oddities and a daily news digest called The Flyover that rounds up what the rest of Minnesota's press has missed. Because it is funded almost entirely by its readers, Racket asks non-members to sign up after a few articles. This guide explains how that works and how to read a full story.

How the Racket paywall works

Racket runs a membership meter. Anyone can open a limited number of articles, after which the site asks you to become a member. Membership at full price is 50 dollars a year or 5 dollars a month and unlocks unlimited articles and the comments section. There is no advertising-funded free tier to fall back on, which is the point: the four owners chose reader funding over ads so that the site answers to the people who read it.

The meter is enforced in the browser. Racket's articles arrive with the full text in the page, so that search engines, social previews and the newsletter can use them, and a script then counts your visits in a cookie and swaps the body for the membership box once you are over the limit. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers why that distinction matters. The reader shows whatever text the publisher serves, and in Racket's case that is the whole piece.

Our tests on 23 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,578-word Racket reader travelogue in the Better Know a Twin Cities Suburb series, a love letter to Eden Prairie, loaded in full, all 30 paragraphs.
• A 771-word Racket edition of The Flyover on Twin Lakes, a town with 134 residents and almost as many scandals, loaded in full, all 17 paragraphs.
• An 844-word Racket edition of The Flyover asking why everyone is suddenly talking about Somali gangs loaded in full, all 18 paragraphs.

Read a Racket article in full

• Copy the article link. Racket links look like racketmn.com/ followed by the headline as a hyphenated slug, with no date or section in the address.
• 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 Flyover is written as a series of short items with its own headings, and the reader keeps those headings in place so the digest reads as it does on the site.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Racket sends The Flyover and other bulletins by email free of charge. The email carries the links, and the linked pages count against the meter in the usual way.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Social accounts. Racket posts its headlines and a good deal of commentary on social media, and its writers are active there.
• Related free sources. Minneapolis and St. Paul council agendas, Minnesota Legislature records and court filings are published free, and much of Racket's political reporting can be checked against them.

How it compares with the Star Tribune

Racket's larger neighbour is the Minnesota Star Tribune, the daily that closed City Pages and so, indirectly, created Racket. The Star Tribune runs a metered paywall of its own and loads in full through the reader, as covered in the guide to the Seattle Times and Star Tribune paywalls. Both appear on the full list of sites that work.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Racket has no owner beyond the people who write it, and no advertising department to lean on. At 50 dollars a year, membership is cheaper than most newspaper subscriptions, and if you read The Flyover every morning it is the obvious way to keep the four of them in business.