The Wall Street Journal – Subscription not required

I simply love to see stories on the Internet that link to the Wall Street Journal; you’ll always get that “subscription required” message, usually in parenthesis, after the link. Even going to the Wall Street Journal website and clicking on the recent stories usually results in a 30 word “FREE PREVIEW” article – as if they’re doing us a favor. But with everything, there are always exceptions; we’ve found a way to access the Journal’s content without paying the annual $79 for a subscription.

You’d think the advertisements on the WSJ web page would provide enough funding to allow visitors to read for free. Even after members pay for subscription, they’re still stricken with advertisements above, next to, and below the page’s content.

Despite the WSJ’s efforts to keep non-subscribers from accessing its content, they simply can’t say no to Google. The WSJ, as the majority of the Internet, rely on Google to bring in search traffic.

Call it bad SEO, but you’re average reader on the WSJ does not see what Google sees, for Google gets free access. This is most likely due to the WSJ wanting Google to index the entire page, as opposed to a few teaser words.

Take a look at a WSJ article URL when you normally navigate to a page:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948.html?mod=home_whats_news_us

Specifically, we’re looking at the “mod=home_whats_news_us” part. Now if we just happened to navigate to the same story from Google News, our URL has changed to:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Notice the “mod=googlenews_wsj” part. However, simply changing the URL to reflect the second URL above is not enough to provide free access; the referring URL must come from news.google.com. 

You can get by this one of two ways.

1. You can perform a Google News search using the article’s title or first paragraph as the query.

2. You can use a developers toolbar to edit the HTML on a Google News page.

Number one is simple; you can usually just search Google News for the headline of the article you want to read, get the results, and click the link. You’re done.

Although, this approach is not 100% because, strangely enough, the Wall Street Journal will sometimes feed Google a different headline than its subscribers will see. You may want to try and search for the “free preview’s” first one or two lines of text.

The second method is a bit more complicated, but has never failed me to date. You just take the URL of the article you want to see - for instance:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948.html?mod=home_whats_news_us

replace the “mod=home_whats_news_us” with “mod=googlenews_wsj” to get:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Now comes the tricky part. You’ll need to go to the Google News page and edit the href on an <a> tag to reflect the modified URL.

I use the plug-in Firebug (for Firefox) to do this; although, any developer toolbar which allows you to edit code on the page will work just fine.

We’ll just take one random link on the Google News page:

View the Source:

Finally, Place the modified URL in-between the quotes after href=
to look like:

<a id=”r-0-0_1118391009″ href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118493224469472948.html?mod=googlenews_wsj”>

After modifying the HTML, you can click the link you selected and it will take you to the full version of the article. This method tricks the Wall Street Journal’s system into thinking that Google is the referrer, thus showing the full article and saving you $79 per year. Enjoy.

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