When you're a small, right-leaning, well-written newspaper in a major market these days, it doesn't make a lot of sense to put your online content behind a pay wall. With your circulation already limited, cutting yourself out of the national (and international) online conversation by demanding subscribers pay only keeps your publication unknown to prospective readers.

Thus, we heave a sigh of relief that the New York Sun has decided to tear down that wall. What took so long?

The full release:

NEW YORK, NY — PRESS RELEASE — The New York Sun is pleased to announce that the newspaper's main website will move to a free access platform, effective today. This move is in response to requests from Sun fans worldwide to make the newspaper's content more easily accessible to those who live outside of delivery areas, in addition to being a natural progression in our strategy to broaden the availability of our unique content to an ever-expanding readership.

There are no plans in place to make similar changes to the Sun's print products. Rather, revolutionizing www.nysun.com into a free online model is yet another step forward in what has been a dynamic year in the Sun's development, during which the paper has doubled its distribution to 100,000, broken internationally exclusive stories, and increased its advertising by more than 50% over last year.

The Sun's site will continue to offer a paid premium version of the website to the significant numbers of readers for whom access to our extensive article archive is vital. These collections contain every review, article, photograph, editorial, and advertisement appearing in the paper since its first publication in 2002. Images of every issue of the Sun as it has appeared in its print form will be available online, as always, only to these subscribers.