From Pew Research: Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

[canetoad]

4. I'm aware this is slightly dishonest

I use NoScript - a browser extension that prevents various server-side scripts from running when a site loads. For many paywalled news sites, I can still read the text; some images and things like surveys (ugh), videos and other non-text elements may or may not appear. Doesn't really matter if all you want is the actual news.

This does not work on every site; I can't read any murdoch sites but then I don't want to. There are a few others but not enough to cut me off from up to date news. Sometimes the settings need to be tweaked a bit and the learning curve can look daunting but it's really not difficult and freely available on browser extension pages.