How to view full WSJ articles for free

The Wall Street Journal is a pretty good resource for business news. I say “pretty good” because it has an annoying pay wall and it’s now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who I find tacky (Fox News, regardless of its politics, is lowest common denominator viewing). I do have to wonder about the profit margins on newspaper advertising if a business like the WSJ can’t reliably make enough money selling advertising on its own site that is relies on a subscription model. Maybe this is just a testament to the success of its subscription model?

Anyway, most WSJ articles are available in full via Google News. In other words, the WSJ wants traffic and attention from Google so that the full content is indexed, but they want to promote the subscription model to their own users. To view the Google News results for the WSJ, simply use the search operator: "site:online.wsj.com". This will give you a results page full of links to the full articles.

One thing you’ll notice is that if you look at the URL for the full article, you’ll see something like: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121375354814283081.html?mod=googlenews_wsj .

The little parameter at the end (?mod=googlenews_wsj) triggers the display of the full article, rather than the short preview version with the subscription prompt you would normally see as a non-subscriber. However, you’ll also notice that if you drop this URL into a new browser session you will get the preview version of the article. Clearly, some referrer checking is going on. If you are referred by Google AND your URL possesses the Google News parameter, you get the full text. If you just use the URL without Google News being the referrer, you get the preview. Argh.

So, how do you get Google News to be the referrer for ANY article on the WSJ site? I don’t know that this can be done. But, you CAN use Google as the referrer by creating a link somewhere within Google’s many services. I tried this with Gmail and Google Notebook, both of which are located at the google.com domain, but for some reason this did not work. But, if you drop the link into a document at Google Docs it will work and WSJ will detect Google as the referrer. It’s a hassle, but if you really need to see the full text of an article and can’t find it in Google News, just drop the URL into a Google Doc, add the “?mod=googlenews_wsj” parameter to the end, and it should work.

2 comments

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