Or why Rupert Murdoch ought to care about clafoutis…

The tree in our garden turns out to have edible cherries.
This is fabulous – I love cherries and my mum and I picked loads of them yesterday.
They are small, dark Chanel Rouge Noir in colour and sweet, with a slight sour note.  Perfect.

We have so many I decided to cook them, and searched my cookbooks in vain for a clafoutis recipe.  The only one I could find required me to make a custard first, and with a migraine coming, that was too much.

So I went online.
The first two recipes Google found were on the Times Online website.  But guess what?  They are now hidden between the £1 a day, £2 a week pay wall.
Did I pay it?  Did I heckaslike. I found the recipe at the excellent Green Chronicle…
And it was delicious.

The thing is, when I find a recipe on the Guardian’s website, I often get distracted.  I end up reading Comment is Free, looking at different bits of the news and enjoying more of the lifestyle bits of the paper.
I used to do that with the Times website, but really what I’m after is the recipe.
Or the Alphamummy debate, or the theatre review that I was looking for.

But nothing makes me particularly inclined to pay £1 to get the recipe.

I already pay a TV licence and have access to the BBC.  I pay Virgin Media and have access to Euronews, Sky, CNN, Al Jazeera English and more.
On top of that there’s Google news and any number of online news outlets.

I used to buy the Guardian, the Times or the Independent pretty much interchangeably if I had a long train journey – otherwise reading a newspaper other than Metro is a luxury I’ve learned to live without.

And now we do so much more online, there’s a realm of excellent citizen bloggers out there who do not have pay walls and provide excellent news commentary, often better than the paid columnists in the mainstream media (I’d rather read Nosemonkey than Jan Moir any day).

So I don’t know whether the paywall is the future of online newspapers or not.  All I know is that it has made me feel less inclined to read the Times overall, and certainly not willing to link to anything that might mean me or my few readers shelling out £1 a day to read it.
If fewer, dedicated subscribers is the business model that works, then it just makes me worry about the quality of what I’d be getting behind that paywall anyway – less now, more in 10 years time.
I’m sure the clafoutis recipes would be fine, but you know what I mean.