How to Read the Wall Street Journal Online for Free
Two days ago, the front page of the Wall Street Journal covered the Twitter outage with the headline, Twitter, a Service of Few Words And Many Followers, Goes Silent If you wanted to read that article or any other on the Wall Street Journal site for free, here’s how.
If you click on a link to the WSJ’s “protected” content through a non”portal” site, you get sent to a limited version of the full article. To read the whole thing, you have to log in. So you would have to register to become a subscriber. If you read the WSJ for work, you probably already have a subscription. Currently a one year online subscription would run you $103 (and the paper version is $140) As of this writing, there is a 2 week free trial online before asking you to become a paid subscriber.
But if you’re only an occasional reader, all you really have to do is a Google search. If you don’t know already know the title or just want to see what happening in the news that day, go the WSJ.com and peruse the content headlines to look for articles you might want to read. Then copy and paste the headline into search on Google. The WSJ wants to be indexed in and accessible via Google. This is great for Google traffic. But it also means you don’t really need a WSJ subscription to read any of its content online.
In addition, many (but not all) of the articles are available through Google News. If you know the title of the article, go there and search for it. If it’s available, you’ll get the full article. Unfortunately, not all articles are available through this avenue.
In April, 2009, the Wall Street Journal released an iPhone app which makes content free. There is also one for the Blackberry. Each page in the new iPhone app contains a prominent ad. However, free content via these mobile devices may not last forever. A company spokesman has been quoted as saying the “intent is to ultimately have a consistent experience across multiple platforms regarding subscription content.”
Related posts and articles:
Murdoch vows to charge for all online content (08/06/09 Financial Times)
