It’s widely known among news junkies — and probably some non-news junkies — that to read anything on The Wall Street Journal‘s website, you simply Google the headline or URL, thereby skipping past the paywall to the full article. See for yourself: paywall vs. no paywall. This method only works when you use Google, so no dice if you’re on Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine.
But wait? Isn’t The Journal owned by News Corporation, whose chief famously accused Google of stealing content and then threatened to pull his websites from their index? And what ever happened to those talks with Microsoft about adding News Corp. content exclusively to Bing? Given the bad blood created over the past year, this arrangement between The Journal and Google feels rather odd.
