Since its an obscure topic, and the BBC article is fairly misleading, here's a little background on what "First Click Free" is all about:
Basically, showing a different page to Googlebot than you show to users (i.e., "cloaking") will get your site delisted. This puts sites like NYTimes.com in a weird spot. They want to force users to register before viewing any articles, but they also want Google to index these same articles (and a forced registration would prevent that). Google wants the same thing (to index the pages), but seeks to avoid special exceptions in its algorithm (e.g., maintaining a whitelist of sites who are allowed to cloak).
In an effort to resolve this problem, "first click free" (FCF) was born.
In essence, FCF means that you show the user the first article without requiring registration, but once they click through to a second article, you can force them to register without running afoul of Google's no-cloaking policy. AFAIK, its not a program you have to opt-into with Google, you just implement it on your site however you like.
The problem is that every click that originates from news.google.com is counted as a "first click", even though it could be the 15th article they've viewed on nytimes.com. So clicking through from Google News becomes a hack to avoid registering for nytimes.com (or wsj.com, etc).
So basically, it looks like Google is relaxing the rules a bit, and saying you can ask for registration even if the click comes directly from Google News, provided the user has already viewed >= 4 articles on your site.
tl;dr: this a fairly minor policy shift, as I read it.
Even if the cloaked-paywall-articles get indexed, couldn't that same fact - that they are behind a paywall and not easily accessible - be interpreted that they offer lower quality search results and thus should be listed further down the organic search result list?