Reading newspapers and magazines for free

Reading is a favourite hobby of mine – on the phone, tablet and from the printed page.  Ever since I was a Smash Hits reading teenager, I have bought magazines. I love trashy gossip magazines, you know Now and Closer, but I also read The Sunday Times and love a good quality women’s read too, like Marie Claire or Vogue. Unfortunately, the gossip magazines are weekly, so I could spend £2.50 a week on those, with my glossy mag at up to £4 a month, then newspapers on top of that.

With the cost of my reading habit mounting up (often over £20 per month), I started to look for ways to cut down.

Firstly, I use Zinio, from the library (you just need your library card number and can read the mags at home) to read FULL digital copies of 60 mags for free…including my beloved Marie Claire, Cosmo and Hello. Frankly, I may not be renewing my gossip mag subscription as I have too much choice now!

If I want to read a newspaper, there are options like The Metro, which you can get as a digital version sent to you via email. However, a lot of its news can be found the day before on the Daily Mail’s website!

The library is an awesome resource and free. They get newspapers and some monthly mags, but sometimes I can’t be bothered to sit with the guys who go in every day.  If you don’t mind reading the papers the next day, you can get full text versions online from the library but they are a day old at least and not set up in the usual format. However, I have used the library newspapers to research a company before a job interview.

Sometimes for quality, you have to pay, so I’ve subscribed to the Times and Sunday Times with a Classic Pack, so I can read the papers daily. That’s £6 a week, a saving of around £3 per week and I get to read a decent newspaper from my tablet.

For my gossip mag fixes, I bought a subscription, so that saves me money and I know that my weekly read is coming in the post, so I’m not tempted to nip into the newsagent for a magazine and come out with other stuff I didn’t need.