Sooner or later, we all hit a paywall while trying to read the news online. Sometimes a cleared cache or incognito browser window might provide limited access to one story, but many news outlets restrict even that practice. Understandably, newsrooms need to pay their bills in the face of declining subscriptions and increasing online competition. Some outlets face outright hostility for their work, such as the small-town Kansas newspaper whose editors' offices and homes were raided by law enforcement last week after the paper received a tip about a local restaurateur's criminal record.
How can you ethically access so many different news sources without breaking the bank? Good news: current members of the Duke Law and Duke University community have many options for accessing the full text of popular news sources. Some require the setup of an individual account, while others need only a NetID login from a link on a Duke website. The Goodson Law Library offers current members of the Law School community access to group subscriptions for several outlets, including The New York Times, Financial Times, and the Washington Post. Details are available at the Legal Databases & Links page and highlights are below.
- The Law community can also set up an individual account with The New York Times by visiting https://nytimesineducation.com/access-nyt/ while on a networked Law School computer (such as the library workstations on level 3) or connected to the VPN (be sure to choose "Library Resources" option rather than the "Default" when logging in). Once connected, type "Duke" under "Find School" and select "Duke University School of Law." Student accounts last until December of the graduation year; faculty and staff accounts require annual renewals. These accounts provide for use on the website as well as mobile apps. Note that they do not include the premium subscription features, such as Games or Cooking.
- The Law community may also join a Financial Times group subscription by registering at https://ft.com/dukelaw with their Duke email address. FT.com accounts under this subscription include unlimited access to stories on the website and mobile.
- Law access to the Washington Post website is unlimited when accessed from a Law School networked computer, the VPN, or by the proxy link here and at Legal Databases & Links. No account is needed, and individual accounts are not covered by this group subscription.
- The entire campus community enjoys access to the Wall Street Journal Online thanks to a partnership between the Law Library and the Ford Library at the Fuqua School of Business. To view details and set up an account with your Duke email address, visit the registration page. Student accounts last for the duration of your enrollment at Duke, including 90 days after graduation.
Legal news sources are also available, such as American Lawyer Media's Law.com and Law360. The web versions are accessible when connected to Law School networked computers, but the full text of these sources are also available to the Duke Law community via Lexis, in its Legal News section.
The Duke University Libraries maintain access to thousands of other news sources, both current and historical. To locate options for accessing the full text of a particular title, try a search of the E-journals list. (Note that Law School-only resources like Lexis and Westlaw will not appear on this campus-wide list, although inclusion in Nexis Uni is a good sign that a source will also be available in the Law School's version of Lexis.)
For example, although local papers like the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Herald-Sun do not provide a group subscription, Duke community members can read the full text of both papers via the America's News database. Each is available in an HTML text view back to the early 1990s and a PDF page-image view back to 2018:
For help with options to access a specific news source, be sure to Ask a Librarian.
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