Salt Lake Tribune Paywall: How to Read Salt Lake Tribune Articles for Free

The Salt Lake Tribune is the largest newspaper in Utah and one of the more unusual ones in the United States. In 2019 it became a non-profit, the first legacy daily in the country to make the change, and it now funds its newsroom through subscriptions, donations and grants rather than a corporate owner. It covers the Utah Legislature, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Great Salt Lake, the Wasatch Front's growth and the state's police and courts, and it has built a reputation for long investigations. Those investigations are the stories most often shared, and they are also the ones most often marked for subscribers, so a reader arriving from a link frequently meets the subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Salt Lake Tribune paywall works

The Tribune runs a metered paywall with subscriber-only pieces on top. A non-subscriber can open a few articles a month before the body of each new one is replaced by a prompt to subscribe, and the paper's longer investigations and some columns are flagged as subscriber-only from the first visit. The count is stored in a browser cookie. Because the Tribune is a non-profit, the subscription is pitched as much as a donation as a purchase.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and hides the body. A 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, and the Tribune sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 20 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,842-word Salt Lake Tribune business feature on how technology has transformed multilevel marketing for Utah's direct sellers loaded in full, all 50 paragraphs.
• A 2,281-word Salt Lake Tribune investigation into Utah County deputies who were investigated for beating suspects but never charged loaded in full, all 66 paragraphs.
• A 2,273-word Salt Lake Tribune story, reported with the Utah Investigative Journalism Project, on a Utah County woman who tried to investigate how police handled her sexual assault allegation loaded in full, all 59 paragraphs.

All three are long investigations, and nothing was cut from any of them.

Read a Salt Lake Tribune article in full

• Copy the article link. Tribune links look like sltrib.com/news/2022/09/01/ followed by a slug and a trailing slash, with section variants such as sltrib.com/news/business/ and sltrib.com/news/politics/.
• 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. Photo galleries and embedded documents are not included.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. The Tribune sends free email newsletters, including a morning briefing and topic letters on politics and the Great Salt Lake, that summarise stories and link to them.
• Library access. Utah public libraries and the state's university libraries carry the Tribune through newspaper databases, and some offer PressReader or a similar service to cardholders.
• Private windows. The monthly meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, though subscriber-only pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. The Deseret News, Salt Lake City's other daily, is free to read online, and Utah Legislature records, court filings and state agency reports are published without charge.

How it compares with other regional papers

The Tribune behaves like the other metered regional papers we have tested. The Seattle Times and the Star Tribune both deliver the full article and apply the meter in the browser, and the Boston Globe, with one of the strictest meters in the country, still loads in full for the same reason. The Deseret News is the odd one out in Salt Lake City because it has no paywall at all. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Salt Lake Tribune became a non-profit so that it could keep a full newsroom in a state where most other papers have shrunk. If you read its investigations and Legislature coverage every week, a subscription or a donation is the right way to keep that reporting going, and as a non-profit it can put every dollar back into the newsroom.