mgroves

The Wall Street Journal, for the most part, is a subscription based service. News Corp. has recently purchased the Dow Jones company, which owns The Wall Street Journal, and some speculate that they will turn it into a “free” service, much like the New York Times, USA Today, and pretty much every other newspaper’s web presence.

Until that day, here is a trick to view any online Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article for free with only marginal hassle.

I pieced this hack together myself, though the parts of it are well documented elsewhere.

WSJ does publish some of its content for free already. I noticed that Google News always seemed to link to these free articles. I’m a WSJ RSS feed subscriber (they have a ton of different feeds, but I subscribe to a few). One day there was an article I really wanted to read the full version of. So, I just copied the title into Google News, and there it appeared. Something must be up!

I noticed mod=googlenews_wsj in the URL of the article. So that got me searching a little bit, and I found a Firefox hack to get WSJ articles for free. However, this method was kinda slow and annoying. Surely there’s a better way!

Just adding mod=googlenews_wsj to the article URL doesn’t work. So I figured that maybe they were also checking the referral URL, and that’s why the Firebug/Webdev thing works. But that’s so much hassle!

Enter RefControl. This is a Firefox plugin that allows you to control what page a site thinks you were referred from. So I just set “online.wsj.com” to always be referred from “news.google.com”.

Once you have RefControl setup this way, the only hassle you have left to do is to change the URL querystring to mod=googlenews_wsj. For instance, this link from the main page: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119090449388941349.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news, just change it to http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119090449388941349.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Done! Free WSJ for everyone.

There’s probably a solution for IE and Opera as well, but for now this just works for Firefox.