I've taken to using Blendle to only pay for WSJ articles that I read. Saves me the money of a full subscription, and makes sure quality journalism is funded. Here's the link in case you want to read it, and support journalism: https://blendle.com/i/the-wall-street-journal/industrial-esp...
Neat service, thanks for posting. For others like my self unfamiliar, it seems to be a site for reading paid articles a la carte.
Onboarding was super easy (just an email address) and they give you a gift balance good for a couple articles ($2.50 in my case). Articles themselves seem a little on the high side (this one was $0.49, which seems to be the norm), but I'll probably continue to use this over other tricks to read WSJ content that crops up here, at least until my credits get used up.
Thank you for the link. This is a cool service. I think that we make a game of trying to get around the paywall. The WSJ should have the right to get paid for their work if that is their model. The existence of that story and everything around it was not free. It is okay for sites to have a paywall and it is okay for a user to say, well it is not worth it to me to pay and move on. If the stuff on the WSJ is good enough then they will make a business of it and if not they will change or die. This ideal that everything on the internet is free is pretty harmful long term as it devalues the work of those that produce the content.
One question, is there a simply way to navigate to the Blendle copy of an article that's paywalled? Do you have to just go to Blendle and search the article title, or is there an easier way?
You can try searching for the headline, but it's not foolproof as some times an article has multiple headlines. If nothing shows up just search for whatever proper noun the story is about (in this case I had to search for the CEO's name). I wish they had a browser extension or something to do this automatically, but I guess newspapers don't want to cannibalize their paywall.
For future reference, here is a procedure for finding an alternative source for stories such as this.
1. Go to the submitted link. It will give you the first paragraph or so.
2. Pick something distinctive from that and copy it. I picked "Samuel Straface".
3. Google for that, and filter that by last 24 hours.
There will usually be another source in the results. Sometimes it is a separate article covering the same underlying story. Sometimes it will be another paper or magazine reprinting the submitted story, which is the case here:
to any WSJ article to bypass the paywall. You have to click "Follow Link" to continue. You don't need to be logged into Facebook (or even have an account) for it to work.
