Read full articles on Wall Street Journal without subscribing

 

A one step method to get free full access to Wall Street Journal articles without subscribing – using a work around from Google Cache – a fully legal method.

You are asked to pay $1.99 per week to get a full access. How can you do it for FREE?

Websites of famous newspapers like Wall Street Journal , Financial Times have some restrictions for non-registered users. I came across this when I have been going through an article on WSJ.

WSJ_locked_articles_free_access_browser

The Wall Street Journal, prompts for registration to view certain articles and certain articles are behind the paywall - you have to pay to read those articles. Such articles have a key symbol beside them as shown below:

WSJ_locked_articles_free_access

So, here is how to get full access to premium content on sites like Wall Street Journal for free without subscribing and paying ($1.99 per week):

The trick is to make use of the cached content of the pages.

Method 1: (Manual method)

  1. Right click on the link and copy the URL of the article which is locked only for registered users.

    WSJ_locked_articles_free_access_2
  2. Now strip this text only till the ".html" part and add the word cache: before it as shown below:
    cache:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181371465957162.html
  3. After adding cache:{URL} paste it in the address bar (if using Chrome) and hit enter it opens the full article.
    WSJ_locked_articles_free_access_3

    If you are using Mozilla Firefox paste the above cache:{URL} in Google search bar:
    wsj_read_full_articles_free_4
    So, essentially you are doing a Google search with the term cache:{URL}. If Google instant search is ON, the trick does not seem to be working.

This method is working - it has been tested. But if you think this is a tedious procedure to open the cached copy always manually, there is an automatic method too.

Method 2: (Automatic Method)

UPDATE: The extension is no more available – so use the manual method

You need Google Chrome browser for this

  1. Install Read WSJ Extension on Chrome from the chrome webstore.
  2. Now it fetches the cached copy of all the locked articles on WSJ (indicated by the unlock icon beside such articles).

That's all ! You have full access to premium and locked content on Wall Street Journal.

Do let us know in case this method does not work.

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2 comments:

Ali said...

thanks

Ry said...

Method 1 works perfectly. Thanks!

Sadly, the Chrome extension from Method 2 seems to have been removed.