The Saturday Paper Paywall: How to Read Saturday Paper Articles for Free

The Saturday Paper is the Australian weekly that Schwartz Media launched in 2014 as a home for long-form reporting, political analysis and essays. It runs a small number of pieces each week, most of them considerably longer than a daily paper would print, and it is read closely in Canberra and by anyone following Australian politics from abroad. It is also a subscription product with one of the tighter gates among Australian titles. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a story in full.

How The Saturday Paper paywall works

The Saturday Paper uses a subscriber paywall with a small free allowance. A visitor can open a handful of articles before the body of the next one is replaced by a subscription prompt, and some exclusives are marked for subscribers from the first visit. The count is kept in a browser cookie, and a subscription, which includes the print edition for Australian readers, removes it.

The gate is applied in the browser. Schwartz Media delivers the full text of each article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks the cookie and hides the body if the allowance is used up. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete piece. This is the same mechanism our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls describes, and it is why The Saturday Paper behaves differently from the News Corp and Nine titles that enforce their limits on the server.

Our tests on 5 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,207-word Saturday Paper exclusive on evidence given to the ICAC inquiry into a former New South Wales premier loaded in full, all 64 paragraphs.
• A 1,981-word Saturday Paper profile of Brittany Higgins and her return to public life through a documentary loaded in full, all 31 paragraphs.
• A 1,905-word Saturday Paper exclusive on NDIS changes being brought forward without announcement loaded in full, all 53 paragraphs.

Read a Saturday Paper article in full

• Copy the article link. Saturday Paper links look like thesaturdaypaper.com.au/section/topic/2026/10/03/headline-slug, with the publication date in the path.
• 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 the full text.

The weekly quiz and the crossword are interactive pages rather than articles, so the reader does not open them.

Other approaches

• Library access. Many Australian public and university libraries carry The Saturday Paper through PressReader, which is free with a library card.
• Private windows. The free allowance lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Newsletters. Schwartz Media's free daily briefing, 7am, summarises the week's reporting and links to the stories it draws on.
• Introductory offers. The paper runs frequent discounted first-year subscriptions and a cheaper digital-only tier.

How it compares with other Australian titles

The Saturday Paper is one of the few Australian national titles the reader opens. The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age all block automated requests and do not work. Among regional papers, the Australian Community Media titles such as The Canberra Times load in full. For a weekly of ideas from the other side of politics, The Spectator, including its Australian edition, also works. The Monthly, Schwartz Media's other title, was not tested. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Saturday Paper is an independent publication that pays writers for weeks of work on a single story, and subscriptions are most of its income. If it is part of your weekend, a subscription is the honest way to keep it going, and the digital tier is modestly priced.