Before we get into the fat of the editorial, so to speak, let me take a little side trip to show you a way you can skirt the paywall of the
Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and read anything written without having to pay for it. The WSJ, like many online news sources, makes money from advertising. The paper also makes money from subscriptions. In order to maximize its ad revenue, the WSJ articles have to rank high in Google, but if an article resides behind a firewall Google can’t breach, then Google doesn’t know it exists and isn’t able to use it to calculate the ranking of the paper. Which suspends the WSJ on the horns of a dilemma. Do they give the articles away free, get a higher Google rating, and lose the subscription fees, or do they keep the subscription income and suffer in their Google rankings, which means less ad money? The way the WSJ has solved the problem is by making the all the articles available to the Google search engines while at the same time making them unavailable to anyone who is on the WSJ site and tries to read the full article.
Which gives you the ability to read anything you want in the WSJ by simply Googling the
Wall Street Journal and the exact name of the article you want to read.
For example, if you wanted to read the editorial above, you would simply
go to Google and enter these words into the search window: wall street journal trans fats transphobia
If you go that, you’ll be taken to the full text version. Give it a try. Then try going through
the WSJ site linked here. When you do, you’ll get a message telling you you need to subscribe to read the rest of the article.
