topic Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library in Credit in the News

Wall Street Journal online via your library

Gollum — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:29:24 GMT

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) currently has an article about credit card networks that I wanted to read, so I finally (I have known for a long time that WSJ articles are paywalled) did a search for how to access paywalled WSJ articles. I was pleased to be able to read the article online via my library, using my web browser and my library card number.

First I logged into my library's website using my web browser and my library card number, then (on my library's website) I searched for Wall Street Journal, and the result had a "Click here to access this full text electronic journal online" link. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader, but I was able to read the WSJ full article, and at the top of the webpage it said "Access provided by [my library name redacted]." Apparently my library uses ProQuest https://about.proquest.com/en/about/who-we-are/

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

TrapLine — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:53:30 GMT

Good information. Never gave it a thought.

Do remember our library system has special networks where they offer subscriptions (they pay for them) to the library members.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

crystal626 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 19:40:22 GMT

Yeah your library can be a great resource. Mine has WSJ, The Denver Post, New York Times, The Washington Post, and a bunch more through EBSCO.

We also have Libby for magazines, OverDrive, Hoopla, Kanopy, and we used to have access to one of the major online course providers but it seems like that's gone now and Consumer Reports is currently broken but I think you can access the magazines through Libby IIRC.

Definitely check into what your local library offers, there's a whole lot of value there.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

LiamDavis — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:56:31 GMT

You can often get a free read on incognito mode too. Or by asking AI to summarize it. Sometimes it works.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

crystal626 — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:28:23 GMT

@LiamDavis wrote:
You can often get a free read on incognito mode too. Or by asking AI to summarize it. Sometimes it works.

You can also just use whatever option your browser has to turn an article into a wall of text on a lot of sites. I have Brave's Speedreader feature set to automatically enable itself on a number of sites with paywalls but I pay for Apple News+ so I get a lot of sites included in that anyway, it's just more convenient to use the actual website than go dig up the article on Apple News.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

Realist — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:18:24 GMT

Not always, but often, you will find that most news sites copy one another for sources of information. At times you can highlight the title, and copy search that into search engines. This can produce the story that's hidden behind paywalls - or something very close.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

AndrewF — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:37:02 GMT

@crystal626 wrote:
Yeah your library can be a great resource. Mine has WSJ, The Denver Post, New York Times, The Washington Post, and a bunch more through EBSCO.

We also have Libby for magazines, OverDrive, Hoopla, Kanopy, and we used to have access to one of the major online course providers but it seems like that's gone now and Consumer Reports is currently broken but I think you can access the magazines through Libby IIRC.

Definitely check into what your local library offers, there's a whole lot of value there.

For a while I was just using Lynx or Elinks (text web browsers) in a terminal to bypass the paywall. It relied on JavaScript and CSS and other junk and if you had a browser that totally ignored that you could still read the article text. I don't know if that still works or not.

Re: Wall Street Journal online via your library

crystal626 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 05:39:19 GMT

@AndrewF wrote:
@crystal626 wrote:
Yeah your library can be a great resource. Mine has WSJ, The Denver Post, New York Times, The Washington Post, and a bunch more through EBSCO.

We also have Libby for magazines, OverDrive, Hoopla, Kanopy, and we used to have access to one of the major online course providers but it seems like that's gone now and Consumer Reports is currently broken but I think you can access the magazines through Libby IIRC.

Definitely check into what your local library offers, there's a whole lot of value there.
For a while I was just using Lynx or Elinks (text web browsers) in a terminal to bypass the paywall. It relied on JavaScript and CSS and other junk and if you had a browser that totally ignored that you could still read the article text. I don't know if that still works or not.

Probably works on the same sites that your browser's reader mode does. I use Brave's reader mode (it's called Speedreader and an icon pops up to the right of URLs that support it) on The Daily Beast, for example (I've set that site to automatically go into reader mode).