Access The Wall Street Journal for Free?

The Wall Street Journal is one of those websites I visit everyday. I have it on My Yahoo home page, so I can get all the news rather quickly. In fact, I have used stories on the WSJ as basis of my posts many times in the past. The problem with the WSJ is that not everything on the website is free. There are many contents are subscription based, meaning that you will have to be a subscriber of the newspaper in order to access some restricted articles online. For example, I was trying to read this article “Alcoa Posts Narrower Loss” on the journal’s website yesterday, but my access was denied because the article is for subscribers only.

In the past, whenever I saw the warning, I just went away without doing anything or even trying to do anything. I don’t have subscription, what else can I do? Besides, I don’t think I will ever pay to read something online. There may be some good information in the paid articles, but there are also enough free contents available on the internet for me to read, so why pay for it?

But that was before, not yesterday. Yesterday, I just used a simple trick I learned from gHacks to read the full article.

Actually, it is very simple. All I need to do was Google the title (according to gHacks, you can also search the URL of the article) of the article “Alcoa Posts Narrower Loss” and click the one from the search results that matched the title and the website.

This trick may have been out there for a long time, but I just knew it yesterday and it appears to be working very well (I didn’t try with other subscription based contents yet, so I don’t know whether it works on other websites or not).

Now that I can get the restricted contents on the WSJ for free, there’s no reason to subscribe to it. No wonder Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the WSJ, wants its contents take off Google search.