How to Read The San Diego Union-Tribune Without a Subscription

The San Diego Union-Tribune is the daily newspaper for San Diego County, covering the Navy and Marine bases, the border, biotech, the Padres and one of the largest county governments in the country. It spent several years under the same ownership as the Los Angeles Times before being sold in 2023 to MediaNews Group, the chain that also owns The Mercury News, The Denver Post and the New York Daily News. The sale moved it onto MediaNews's shared platform and its metered paywall. This guide explains how that paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the Union-Tribune paywall works

The Union-Tribune runs a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a limited number of free articles a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced with a subscription prompt. The paper does not publish the exact allowance, and it has changed since the move to MediaNews.

The mechanism is the same across the MediaNews papers. The complete article is delivered in the page so search engines can index it, and a script running in your browser applies the gate. A crawler-style reader retrieves the whole text. In our test on 28 September 2026, a 1,885-word Union-Tribune arts feature on a new theatre production loaded in full through Skip the Paywall, all 46 paragraphs.

Read a Union-Tribune story in full

• Copy the article link. Union-Tribune links look like sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/09/28/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

• Library access. The San Diego Public Library and San Diego County Library both offer free digital access to the Union-Tribune with a library card. It is the most durable free option for daily readers.
• Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, so a private window resets it.
• The e-edition. The print replica is subscriber-only and not available through any reader tool.

Southern California papers compared

• Work in full: the Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, which uses a different platform but the same metered model. The MediaNews papers to the north, including the Orange County Register, the Press-Enterprise and The Mercury News, share the Union-Tribune's platform and behave the same way, as does the New York Daily News.
• Bot challenge: the San Francisco Chronicle shows a verification page instead of the article and cannot be fetched.
• Blocked: the Gannett papers in California, such as The Desert Sun and the Ventura County Star, refuse automated requests.

Nationally, The Boston Globe and the Seattle Times and Star Tribune also load in full, while The Washington Post serves only a teaser. The complete list is in every site you can read for free, and metered versus hard paywalls explains why the categories differ.

Support the paper if you read it often

The Union-Tribune's newsroom has shrunk under successive owners, and what remains is funded largely by digital subscriptions. Introductory offers usually run at a dollar a week or less. If it is part of your daily routine, that is the right way to keep it going.