Noscript usually works pretty well for this sort of thing, as well. Also very interesting to see what domains a site is grabbing its javascript from (and which sites are calling from 20+ different domains for a simple news website...!)
Or just press stop before the paywall executes.
That only shows me the first few paragraphs.
That always works like a charm!
Firefox has hardwired me to enter Ctrl+Alt+R whenever something even slightly interferes with reading the content.