Washington Examiner Paywall: How to Read Premium Articles for Free

The Washington Examiner is a conservative news organisation based in Washington, DC, publishing a daily news site and a weekly print magazine. Most of its day-to-day political reporting and opinion is free to read, which is why many people are surprised when a link stops at a subscription prompt. The prompt belongs to the Examiner's premium section, where its longer investigations and magazine features live. This guide explains how that gate works and how to read a premium story in full.

How the Washington Examiner paywall works

The Examiner uses a freemium model. Breaking news, columns and editorials are open to everyone with advertising. Stories published under the premium label, which have /premium/ in their address, are reserved for subscribers, and a non-subscriber sees the opening paragraphs before the page asks for payment. There is no monthly allowance to work through; a premium story is gated from the first visit.

The gate is applied in the browser. The Examiner wants search engines to index its premium reporting so that the stories can be found, so the complete text is delivered in the page, and a script then checks for a subscriber login and hides the body if there is none. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the entire article. This is the same mechanism our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls describes.

Our tests on 1 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,164-word Washington Examiner premium feature on the wealthy donors who backed the Southern Poverty Law Center loaded in full, all 39 paragraphs. This was a premium story, gated from the first view on the Examiner's own site.
• An 884-word Washington Examiner piece arguing that the origins of COVID-19 are no longer in dispute loaded in full, all 25 paragraphs.
• A 678-word Washington Examiner editorial on confronting an axis of hostile powers loaded in full, all 19 paragraphs.

Read a Washington Examiner article in full

• Copy the article link. Premium links look like washingtonexaminer.com/premium/1234567/headline-slug/, and free stories follow a similar pattern under their section name.
• 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, without the subscription prompt or advertising.

Other approaches

• The free site. Most Examiner reporting is not premium. If a story has been covered in the news section as well as in a premium feature, the news version is usually open.
• Newsletters. The Examiner's free email newsletters summarise the day's coverage and link to stories, including some that are otherwise gated.
• Library access. The weekly magazine is carried by PressReader at many US public libraries, which gives free access with a library card.
• Subscription offers. The Examiner runs introductory digital offers through the year, and the magazine subscription includes full site access.

How it compares with similar titles

The Examiner behaves like most opinion-led political titles we have tested. The Spectator and UnHerd both gate in the browser and load in full. Two others in the same space do not: National Review blocks automated requests outright, and The Atlantic does the same, so neither works through the reader. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date as publishers change their approach.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The premium section exists because the Examiner's long investigations take weeks of a reporter's time, and subscriptions pay for that. If you find yourself reading its premium features every week, a subscription is the right way to keep them coming, and it includes the print magazine.