Paywalls You Cannot Skip: NYT, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg and What to Do Instead

We get more questions about The New York Times, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal than about every other publication combined, and the answer is always the same: no reader tool can open them. This post explains why, honestly, and then covers the free routes that do exist for each of them. If you have landed here hoping for a trick, there is not one, but there are alternatives.

Why these sites fail

A reader tool can only show you text the publisher's server actually sends. On a metered paywall, the server sends the full article and a script in your browser hides it, so a crawler-style fetch gets everything. The sites below do something different.

The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Economist and Barron's

These enforce their paywalls on the server. A request without a valid subscriber login gets a headline and one or two paragraphs, and that is all that ever leaves the building. In our testing, a WSJ article came back as 126 words with a Dow Jones copyright notice, and an Economist leader as 136 words of a four-minute read. There is nothing more to extract. These are true hard paywalls.

The New York Times, The Atlantic and Forbes

These use bot protection in front of their sites. Automated requests, including the crawler-style fetch a reader makes, receive a 403 error rather than a page. Their paywalls may or may not be metered underneath, but the reader never gets far enough to find out. The Washington Post behaves similarly and serves a two-paragraph teaser when it does respond.

The Telegraph

The Telegraph blocks any connection it decides is unusual, showing an "Access Issue Help" page instead of the article. Its server also demanded a bot-check from our test machine before it would show even the homepage.

What to do instead

Library access

This is the big one. Most public libraries in the US, UK, Canada and Australia give cardholders free access to at least one of these titles:

• The New York Times: many US libraries offer a free 72-hour pass that you renew from the library site, and some provide full access.
• The Wall Street Journal and Barron's: increasingly available through library subscriptions, often with a three-day renewable pass.
• The Financial Times: widely available through PressReader at public libraries, and most universities provide full access.
• The Economist: available through PressReader and Libby at many libraries.
• Bloomberg: rarely available through libraries, but Bloomberg's own newsletters and the free tier of its site cover a surprising amount.

Ask a librarian. This is legal, free and works on every article.

Free tiers and gifted articles

• The Economist and the FT each offer a few free articles a month to registered users, and both let subscribers share gift links that open for anyone.
• The New York Times gives subscribers gift articles every month, so if a friend subscribes, ask them to send the link that way.
• Bloomberg publishes a substantial amount for free on its main site and all of its podcasts.

Wire copy and syndication

Business and finance news from the FT, WSJ and Bloomberg is often reported within hours by Reuters, the Associated Press and Business Insider, all of which you can read. For the FT in particular, syndicated versions of its stories regularly appear on partner sites.

Sites that cover the same ground and do work

• For business: Fortune and Time, Business Insider.
• For US politics and long-form: The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Nation.
• For UK news: The Times and The Independent.
• For foreign affairs: Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

A word on tools that claim otherwise

Any site or extension that promises to open the FT or the WSJ is either using shared subscriber credentials, which is a different and much more serious matter than reading a publicly served page, or it is not working. We would rather tell you plainly which sites cannot be read than pretend.