Disclosure: Hushread is my app. I’ve tried to be fair, and I say where the others are the better choice.
An RSS feed doesn’t get you past a paywall. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Bloomberg all publish free feeds, but each item is a headline and a sentence or two, and the link opens the same page a non-subscriber always sees. The Economist and The Washington Post feeds don’t reach a reader at all right now. The surprise is The Atlantic, whose feed carries most articles in full. I fetched nine paywalled outlets’ feeds on 19 October 2026; the table shows what each one gave me.
What each paywalled feed carries
Feeds checked on 19 October 2026.
| Outlet | Feed URL | Result | Items | Each item carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The New York Times | https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml | Works | 23 | Headline, one-sentence summary, picture on most |
| The Wall Street Journal | https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSWorldNews | Works | 70 | Headline, one-sentence summary, picture |
| Financial Times | https://www.ft.com/?format=rss | Works | 10 | Headline, one-line standfirst, thumbnail |
| Bloomberg | https://feeds.bloomberg.com/markets/news.rss | Works | 20 | Headline, one or two sentences, no picture |
| The Atlantic | https://www.theatlantic.com/feed/all/ | Works | 25 | Headline, summary and, in most entries, the full article |
| The New Yorker | https://www.newyorker.com/feed/everything | Works | 50 | Headline, dek and picture |
| Wired | https://www.wired.com/feed/rss | Works | 50 | Headline, dek and picture |
| The Economist | https://www.economist.com/latest/rss.xml | HTTP 403 | 0 | A Cloudflare “Just a moment…” page |
| The Washington Post | https://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/world | HTTP 502 | 0 | An nginx error page |
The Post’s politics feed gave the same 502 as its world feed. Both outlets were failing the same way when I wrote about feeds that stop updating a day earlier.
NYT RSS feed
The Times describes its feeds as “headlines, summaries and links back to full articles”, and allows them for “personal use in a news reader or as part of a non-commercial blog” (The New York Times). That matches what came back: 23 items in the home page feed, each with one sentence under the headline, such as “Newly unsealed court files and interviews challenge the popular narrative around the murders and the ‘trial of the century.’”
Section feeds follow the same pattern; the main ones are in my list of news feeds that work.
WSJ RSS feed
The Journal’s feeds moved to feeds.content.dowjones.io, and the World News feed returned 70 items, the most of any outlet here. Each has a one-sentence summary (“GOP politicians in a number of tight races are breaking with Trump on Russia policy ahead of midterms.”) and a picture. Feeder’s guide lists the other working sections and notes that the old wsj.com and feeds.a.dj.com addresses no longer get new stories (Feeder).
FT RSS feed
Some guides say the FT has no feed of its own. It does: ft.com/?format=rss redirects to ft.com/rss/home/international, a feed of 10 items with the FT’s copyright line and a link to its reuse terms.
The FT’s international home page feed, 19 October 2026. Source: ft.com
Each item is a headline, the standfirst and a thumbnail. When I opened the first item’s link in a browser, the page title was “Subscribe to read” (FT article), with subscription offers where the story would be.
Bloomberg RSS feed
Bloomberg doesn’t advertise its feeds, but feeds.bloomberg.com/markets/news.rss redirects to bloomberg.com/feeds/markets/news.rss and returned 20 current items (Bloomberg feed). Its summaries are the most useful of the group, one or two full sentences, such as “Oil retreated from a five-month high, as traders weighed flareups in fighting in the Middle East against signs supply from the region is holding at near pre-war levels.” There are no pictures. The same pattern worked for politics (feeds.bloomberg.com/politics/news.rss, with current stories). Since the addresses aren’t listed on a Bloomberg page, treat them as working today, not promised.
The Atlantic: the paywalled feed that isn’t
The Atlantic sells subscriptions with “unlimited articles”, from $89.99 a year for Digital, with Print and Digital at $99.99 and Premium at $130 (The Atlantic). Its feed, though, is an Atom file of 410 KB for 25 entries, and most entries carry the article itself, from the first paragraph to the last line.
The Atlantic’s all-articles feed as Chrome displays it, 19 October 2026. Source: theatlantic.com
Fifteen of the 25 entries had more than 8,000 characters of article text, and the three I read to the end finished on the article’s final sentence. Only one entry was short. This is The Atlantic’s own feed, not a workaround, but it is also the kind of thing a publisher can change without notice.
The Atlantic’s subscription plans as shown to a visitor in India on 19 October 2026, priced in US dollars. Source: theatlantic.com
The Economist and The Washington Post
Neither feed works right now. For a headline list, a Google News search limited to the site works: site:economist.com when:7d returned 100 Economist headlines from the past week, and site:washingtonpost.com when:1d returned 100 Post headlines from the past day. Those feeds carry only the headline, link through Google, and stop at 100 items; Google News RSS feeds has the URL formats and limits.
What works if you don’t subscribe
Use the feed as an alert. A headline and one sentence is enough to know a story exists. Pair a paywalled feed with a reader rule that notifies on a keyword, and you hear about the stories you care about without paying for the rest.
Read the same story somewhere you can. Big stories rarely stay with one outlet. The FT’s top item on 19 October, US threats over Europe’s Starlink restrictions, was in a Google News search that morning from about a dozen other outlets, Anadolu Agency and Times Now among them.
In Hushread, an article from a walled outlet often has an Also mentioned in line under it, listing other outlets covering the same news; tap one to read that version (Hushread docs). Hushread doesn’t get past paywalls itself. A Notify rule sends a push alert for every article whose title or summary matches a keyword (rules), so a headline-only FT feed becomes an alert for the stories you care about. The free plan holds 5 sources.
What works if you do subscribe
Subscribing to the website doesn’t change the public feed. The feed still carries the same summary, and the full article is on the publisher’s page, where your login lives.
A few publishers give paying readers a private full-text feed. 404 Media, which runs on Ghost, says plainly that “the fulltext RSS feed is a feature for paid subscribers only”, and each paid subscriber is assigned a custom feed (404 Media). Substack documents private feeds only for paid podcasts; its public feed shows the opening of each paid post, as tested in the Substack RSS feed guide. None of the newspapers above advertises one.
FAQ
Can an RSS feed get around a paywall?
No. A publisher’s feed carries whatever the publisher puts in it, usually a headline and a summary, and the link leads to the same paywalled page. The exceptions are publishers that choose to put full text in the feed, such as The Atlantic’s.
Does the NYT RSS feed have full articles?
No. The New York Times describes its feeds as headlines, summaries and links back to full articles. The home page feed had 23 items, each with a one-sentence summary.
Is there a WSJ RSS feed?
Yes. The working feeds are on feeds.content.dowjones.io, such as https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSWorldNews, which returned 70 items with one-sentence summaries.
Does the FT have an RSS feed?
Yes. https://www.ft.com/?format=rss redirects to the international home page feed, which returned 10 items with a headline, standfirst and thumbnail. The articles it links to ask you to subscribe.
Is there a Bloomberg RSS feed?
https://feeds.bloomberg.com/markets/news.rss returned 20 current headlines with one or two sentences each. Bloomberg doesn’t list it on a page, so it may change.
If you read one of these papers every day, the subscription is the better tool, and its own app will do more than any feed. If you don’t, pair the headline feed with a keyword alert and read the story from an outlet that isn’t walled. Hushread does both from one feed.