How to Read Subscriber-Only WSJ Content for Free

By Zoli Erdos on May 11, 2009

While the debate on the Wall Street Journal’s planned micro-payment scheme goes
on, I thought I’d drop a reminder on how to read the Journal’s paid content for
free. If you are a “traditional” reader, starting from the home page, you’ll
see a lot of grey “key” icons, all indicating articles behind a pay-wall.

Of course nowadays many of us don’t even read the front page, we’re using social filtering: let what’s important find us through links from our primary sources: blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook updates from people we follow. But when you follow a link like this: Banks sell stock to repay TARP – it;s really frustrating to find that all you can read is a teaser, with a prompt:

To continue reading, subscribe now.

Yeah, right. But don’t give up! Whichever way you arrive to protected WSJ articles, they are actually available for free reading. All you have to do is select / copy the article’s title, drop it into a Google search box, then click on the relevant entry from the search results:

Voila! The full text is available for reading without subscription. And if you use a Firefox extension like Customize Google (and probably several others), you don’t even have to copy/paste ..etc. Just highlight the title, right click, and the Google search option is immediately available:

Happy reading!