Well, well. BabyBarista, whose witty law blog has hitherto been a must-read on the Times site, has jumped ship.

I have today withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from The Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a paywall along with their other content. Now don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the decision to start charging. They can do what they like. But I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it. Hence my decision to resign which I made with regret. I remain extremely grateful to The Times for hosting the blog for the last three years and wish them luck with their experiment. I hope very much you like the new site and also the addition of the wonderful cartoons by Hollywood animator Alex Williams who also draws the Queen’s Counsel cartoons for The Times.

Good for him.

LATER: Just noticed that Roy Greenslade has more on this. It seems that BabyBarista (aka Tim Kevan) has some reservations about the Murdoch paywall:

I think the decision will prove to be a disaster. There are so many innovative ways of making cash online and the decision to plump for an across-the-board blanket subscription over the whole of their content makes them look like a big lumbering giant, unable to cope with the diversification of the media brought about by online content, blogging, Facebook, Twitter – the list is endless.

Canute-like in their determination to stop the tide of free content and using a top down strategy which makes even the Post Office look dynamic.

Now for the next interesting question: what will Mary Beard, the Cambridge Professor of Classics, do? Her blog has hitherto been the other reason for reading the Times.