I know this has been done to death, but...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

Seriously, why do we need in-depth journalism uncovering frauds like Theranos when we can have free blogspam about personal experiences at coding boot camps.

> Why does WSJ get a pass?

At least in this case, the WSJ article looks like it's the primary source for this story:

https://www.google.com/#tbm=nws&q=%22Tom+Malafronte%22

The other hits that come up (right now) are foreign-language articles and/or cite the WSJ.

More broadly, my guess would be the WSJ is tolerated because it often has interesting stories that aren't covered or covered well anywhere else (and we're all fairly adept at avoiding its paywall).

WSJ gets a pass because the content is often high-quality and, as demonstrated above, it's trivially easy to get around the paywall. Were it not trivially easy, it wouldn't get a pass.