Shaw Local Paywall: How to Read Northwest Herald, Daily Journal and Other Shaw Papers for Free

Shaw Local is the shared website of Shaw Media's newspapers in northern Illinois: the Northwest Herald in McHenry County, the Daily Journal in Kankakee, the Daily Chronicle in DeKalb, The Times in Ottawa, the Dispatch-Argus in the Quad Cities, the Sauk Valley papers and the My Suburban Life weeklies around Chicago's western suburbs, among others. All of them publish at shawlocal.com under their own section, and all of them share one paywall. If you follow a village board, a high-school team or a county court case in the Chicago collar counties, you will have run into it. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a Shaw Local story in full.

How the Shaw Local paywall works

Shaw Local uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can open a limited number of stories a month, tracked in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Because the papers share one site, the count is shared too: a Daily Journal story and a Northwest Herald story draw from the same allowance.

The gate is applied in the browser. The full article is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script hides the text once the cookie says you are over the limit. A crawler-style reader that never runs the script receives the whole story.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 788-word Daily Journal report on a high-school volleyball comeback win over Kankakee loaded in full, all 33 paragraphs.
• A 414-word My Suburban Life preview of a Glen Ellyn village board meeting on public safety loaded in full, all 14 paragraphs.

Read a Shaw Local article in full

• Copy the article link. Shaw Local links look like shawlocal.com/paper-name/2026/09/28/headline-slug/, where the first path segment names the paper.
• 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. Many McHenry, Kankakee and DeKalb county libraries offer their local Shaw paper through a digital newsstand with a library card, and the print editions are on the shelves.
• Newsletters. Each Shaw title has a free daily headlines email with links to the day's stories.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it.
• Introductory offers. Shaw Local runs regular discounted digital trials, and a subscription includes the e-editions.

How it compares with other Chicago-area papers

Shaw Local behaves like the other Chicago-area papers we have tested. The Daily Herald in Arlington Heights and the Chicago Tribune both meter in the browser and load in full. The Gannett papers in Illinois, including the Rockford Register Star and the Peoria Journal Star, block automated requests and do not work. 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

Shaw Media is a family-owned company that has kept newsrooms open in towns most chains have abandoned. If one of its papers covers your town and you read it often, a subscription is the honest way to keep it there, and it is cheaper than a metro daily.