HOW much more edifying the Bishop of Winchester turns out to be. Readers of last week’s Church Times (News, page 3) must have wondered who was the decisive bishop who offered his dressing gown to a naked woman whose revelry interrupted the House of Bishops’ meeting in York. It was Bishop Scott-Joynt, and Jonathan Petre’s follow-up in the Mail on Sunday had a very old-fashioned quote from him: “I went promptly back into my room and wondered what I should do. I then went out again and threw the naked girl my dressing gown. She seemed desperately embarrassed to have locked herself out of her room. One of them must then have set off the fire alarm.”
“Desperately embarrassed” is good. Perhaps it will become a recognised euphemism: “I had lunch with Brute of The Beast last week, and it was just like old times. We left the restaurant at five, desperately embarrassed.”
THE most important development of the week is largely invisible. The old times have gone for good. The Times online has gone behind its paywall. Ruth Gledhill’s blog is still outside it, for a while, but not for ever. This hasn’t stopped rivals from behaving as if it were already concealed. Her story about the Church of England’s World Cup prayers appeared verbatim on the Telegraph’s website without credit, and was then — she says — very lightly rewritten by the PA for its own purposes. There is some kind of justice when the PA rewrites newspaper stories and passes them off as its own, but this does show how viciously the industry is contracting.
Like every remotely disinterested observer, I hope that the Murdoch paywall experiment succeeds. Journalism needs some way to be paid for, and advertising online clearly won’t do it. On the other hand, I don’t suppose that it will work, and I don’t know anyone who does. The reason isn’t so much that no one will pay — the FT can charge for its content, and so can The Economist — but people won’t pay for news any more, because it’s a commodity. There is no one whose life is really changed by reading at 3.23 p.m. that the Church of England has produced a set of prayers for the World Cup, instead of waiting until 5.47 p.m. to learn the same thing off some other website.
If news won’t be valuable, comment or opinion is just as worthless. The thing about opinions is that everyone has them, and hardly any of them are in the least bit interesting, even to their possessors. No, the two things for which there will always be a small public audience are truth and judgement, but the demand for this is much smaller than the demand for entertainment or distraction, the two things that advertisers will always subsidise. The supply of judgement, at least, will always be smaller than the demand.