SaltWire Paywall: How to Read the Chronicle Herald, Telegram and Other Atlantic Canada Papers for Free

SaltWire is the shared website of Atlantic Canada's daily and weekly newspapers: the Halifax Chronicle Herald, The Telegram in St. John's, the Cape Breton Post, The Guardian in Charlottetown, the Truro News and a long list of community weeklies across Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. The network went through creditor protection in 2024 and was bought by Postmedia, but the papers kept the SaltWire site and its paywall. If you follow news from the Maritimes or the Rock from anywhere else, you will have run into it. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the SaltWire paywall works

SaltWire uses a metered paywall with subscriber-only stories on top. Non-subscribers get a limited number of articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Columns, investigations and much of the court reporting are marked as premium, so a first-time visitor can hit the gate immediately on the story that was shared with them. One subscription covers every paper on the site.

Both gates are applied in the browser. The full article is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks the cookie and hides the text. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does, without running the script, receives the complete story.

Our tests on 5 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,549-word SaltWire commentary by a former Stratford mayor on the town council loaded in full, all 38 paragraphs.
• A 1,330-word SaltWire feature on a Newfoundland man buying his grandparents' church to keep it in the family loaded in full, all 43 paragraphs.
• A 680-word SaltWire report on layoff notices at a Halifax bank contact centre loaded in full, all 17 paragraphs.

Read a SaltWire article in full

• Copy the article link. SaltWire links look like saltwire.com/nova-scotia/headline-slug or saltwire.com/prince-edward-island/headline-slug, with the province or city as the first part of the path. Older links carry a numeric id at the end.
• 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.

Section pages such as saltwire.com/category/prince-edward-island are listings rather than articles, so paste the link to the story itself.

Other approaches

• Library access. Halifax Public Libraries and the provincial library systems in Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador offer the SaltWire papers through PressReader with a library card.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, although premium stories stay locked.
• Newsletters. The free morning newsletters carry a summary of each day's top stories.
• Introductory offers. SaltWire runs low-cost first-month subscriptions and a digital-only tier that covers all of its titles.

Atlantic and Canadian papers compared

SaltWire behaves like the other Canadian papers we have tested. The National Post and the rest of Postmedia load in full, as does the independent Winnipeg Free Press. New Brunswick's Telegraph-Journal, the one Atlantic daily not on SaltWire, also works. The Toronto Star serves only a teaser and does not. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls covers the difference, and the full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The SaltWire papers are among the last daily newsrooms in Atlantic Canada, and they came close to disappearing in 2024. If one of them covers your town, a subscription is the honest way to keep a reporter at the council meeting, and one subscription covers the whole network.