Waukesha Freeman Paywall: How to Read gmtoday.com Articles for Free

gmtoday.com, or Greater Milwaukee Today, is the shared website of Conley Media, the family-owned publisher based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, also known as the Conley Publishing Group. Its flagship is the Waukesha Freeman, which has been Waukesha County's daily since 1859 and still prints Tuesday to Saturday. The same site carries the Oconomowoc Enterprise and the Washington County Daily News in West Bend. Its most-shared stories are the ones a county paper does best, prep football previews, school board rows and city council disputes, and a reader arriving from a Facebook share or a search result frequently meets the subscription prompt instead. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the gmtoday.com paywall works

gmtoday.com runs on BLOX, the content system used by many US local papers, with a metered, subscriber-only gate applied in the browser. As far as we can tell, non-subscribers can open a small number of stories before the prompt appears, and some stories are reserved for subscribers from the start. The Freeman, the Enterprise and the Daily News all sit behind the same system because they share the same site.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then checks whether you are a subscriber or over your limit and swaps the body for the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and gmtoday.com sits firmly on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 29 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,636-word Waukesha Freeman Week 9 prep football preview for Waukesha County loaded in full, all 82 paragraphs.
• A 3,320-word Waukesha Freeman Week 8 prep football preview for Waukesha County loaded in full, all 105 paragraphs.
• A 448-word Oconomowoc Enterprise report on an alderman expressing frustration about a lack of information loaded in full, all 12 paragraphs.

Read a Waukesha Freeman article in full

• Copy the article link. Freeman links look like gmtoday.com/the_freeman/sports/ followed by the headline and article_ plus an id and .html, and Oconomowoc Enterprise links sit under gmtoday.com/oconomowoc_enterprise/news/.
• 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 full text.

The same steps work for the Oconomowoc Enterprise. The Washington County Daily News shares the site and the gate, so we would expect it to behave the same way, though we have not tested it separately.

Other approaches

• The print paper. The Freeman still prints five days a week, and a county daily on paper is one of the better-value newspapers left in the United States.
• Library access. Many public libraries in Waukesha County and the wider Milwaukee area carry local papers in print or through digital newspaper services for cardholders; ask at the desk before paying.
• Private windows. As far as we can tell the meter is stored in your browser, so a private window resets it, though subscriber-only pieces stay closed.
• Related free sources. Waukesha County, the City of Waukesha and the local school districts publish meeting agendas, minutes and budgets free, and high school scores and schedules are posted by the WIAA, so much of what the Freeman reports can be checked at source.

How it compares with other Milwaukee and Midwest papers

The obvious comparison is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and it does not work: the Gannett paper's site, jsonline.com, failed on 15 of 16 reader requests this week, so there is no Journal Sentinel guide and the Freeman is the Milwaukee-area paper the reader can open. Elsewhere in Wisconsin, Eau Claire's Leader-Telegram passed on the same day as the Freeman, and it is covered in our guide to the Adams Publishing papers. Across the border, the Minnesota Star Tribune loads, as our Seattle Times and Star Tribune guide explains, and so do several smaller Midwest dailies: the Mankato Free Press, the Marshalltown Times-Republican and Fargo's Inforum. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Conley Media is a family-owned company running a local newsroom in a county where the alternative is a national chain that has already pulled up the drawbridge. If you read the Freeman's prep sports coverage or follow Waukesha County politics every week, a digital subscription, with prices on gmtoday.com, is the right way to keep a reporter in the council chamber.