Is there any good way to read articles of online magazines w/o subscription?

Cafe Society
1

So once again, an interesting article crops up somewhere on my feed, and I click… Only to find myself faced with a notice that I’ve exhausted my free articles for the month/year/whatever, but not to worry because luckily, there’s a special promotion for only €€ if I sign up right now!

But I’ve got just about all the flatrates, streaming subscriptions, and whatnot I care for, so I just grumble and ignore it. Thing is, I really feel that there ought to be an option for just paying for the one article, or maybe the issue—you know, like in the good old days, where you’d see a magazine with some interesting topics at the newsagent’s, hand over a definite quantity of money, and then that’s that—no need to keep track of some automated monthly payment and whatnot. But it seems like there’s no real online equivalent—everything wants you to subscribe (not to mention send me alerts of new articles, something I never figured out why anybody would want that).

The only thing I found so far is Readly, but that really seems to be mostly tabloids, and would also mean a monthly subscription.

So, does anybody have a (legal, naturally) solution for this problem? Or am I just going about things in the entirely wrong way in this modern day and age?

2

Check your public library. Many of them have free online access to lots of magazines and such.

3

And you can always try right clicking on links and opening them in an incognito window.

4

12ft ladder
removepaywall
archive.today
These might guide you to archived versions of web pages.

5

If you’re patient enough, free access to a lot of articles is available when a new month starts and you get a renewed allotment of “freebies”. And there are generally a lot of alternatives on straight news articles.

I agree that it would be useful to have an option to pay a nominal price for a good in-depth article, not that I’d be likely to shell out for it. I have subscriptions to three online newspapers (one of which is “full” online price) so it’s not like I’m not supporting local/national journalism.

6

  1. Clear your cookies for the site that says you’ve used up your allotment of articles.

  2. Or open a different browser to access the website. The new browser maintains a different batch of cookies.

7

Copy and paste the url into archive.is. If it is not already archived, follow the steps to archive it.

8

Thanks for the workarounds. However, they’re not really what I’m looking for—I do want to compensate people producing content I find interesting for their work, but was looking for a—for me—more convenient way of doing so. But it seems there isn’t really one—well, I suppose the world isn’t really obliged to be convenient for me.

9

I have no experience of it but something like the below might work:

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of multi-site subscription services.