This is a fairly naive approach that tolerates having a lot of sites not work. To be sure, the sites that do work without Javascript are the best sites, the least spy-industrial-complex afflicted of what is out there.

But, that said, there is a more modest approach which is to run NoScript on Firefox and authorize Javascript on one site at a time as needed. Now NoScript and Firefox both come with big crooked "whitelists" but at least for the moment you can still disable what you see there.

A notable advantage of disabling scripts is that a LOT of news websites are really, really dumb. They have come up with something so stupid I couldn't believe the first time they did it and now everybody of course wants to copy it. Namely, the sites seem to rely on cookies to let people read one article from a web search, then start pretending they can't find any other article you click on. But I guess they use a script to check if you're accepting their cookies? So I just block all cookies from nyt, sanluisobispo, usnews, bostonglobe, kansascity, idahostatesman, miamiherald ... whatever dot com, and then they are as readable as in the glory days of the web before this script nonsense and the third party spy ads it was meant to propagate had ever been introduced, despite putting on a pretense of not being readable at all. I wonder if subscribers have as good an experience.