The Times‘ paywall has finally been breached this afternoon as the paper’s bosses decided to allow some of its opinion writers to be read online for free. The move appears to be a first step towards a Wall Street Journal-style semi-permeable website. Could editor James Harding be set to usher in a new age of glasnost?

This is the digital opinion equivalent of 1989…

UPDATE:

@hugorifkind That's what Erich Honecker said in 1989

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) June 12, 2012

It is not too pedantic to say self-evidently that is not completely true…