Gordon in the morning: The clanging of the paywall

The idea, you'll recall, is for people to start paying for The Sun's insights and scoops. Just as soon as they've worked out how.

Meanwhile, the only way to ensure that people pay for tabloid stuff is to keep it in the newspaper. And by "ensure people pay", I mean "force people to borrow a copy off the bloke work".

So a couple of weeks back, the News Of The World didn't put its famous photo of Michael Jackson's death bed online, instead instructing people to pop out and buy a copy of the paper.

Clearly, team Sun has been waiting for a similar massive scoop that would persuade the ublic to switch off their computers and troop down to the newsagents, to stand reading the paper in the shop.

Today, they have something:

Yes, there seems to be some certainty at Wapping that people will pay good, hard cash for Gordon's view of what the future might hold for Oasis. You won't find that online.

(Except for when Gordon published his view of what the future might hold for Oasis yesterday.)

I can see that the paper might believe that there's money to be made out of making it harder to get to the celebrity scoops, but do they really think that Smart's speculations are so acute and valued that people will go out of their way to read them?

Elsewhere - and for free - Gordon has a "isn't Matt Bellamy nuts?" piece:

The frontman researched conspiracy theories for new album The Resistance - and then started believing them.

He ended up thinking the UK could run out of food within a fortnight so went into survivalist mode.

Matt drove to his local food store and bought all 50 tins of beans. Then he went to a DIY store to get an axe.

The rocker said: "I read somewhere a seven-day blockade and the UK would run out of oil.

"Another seven days and we'd run out of food. That's why I bought the beans. The axe would chop firewood."

The obvious questions - where did he see a fourteen-day blockade coming from, where was he going to be getting the firewood from and wouldn't it have been better to have bought firewood, how long does he think he would last with fifty tins of beans, and is it really wise to have an open fire if you're diet is consisting entirely of the musical fruit - are ignored, as Gordon shares his insight into such behaviour:

It all sounds wacky races to me.

Just to reiterate that point, there's a crosshead:

Wacky

Now, you might be wondering why this scintillating insight is being given away free. But it turns out that the whole piece is based on something Smart read in Q. You could pick up a copy when you're in the shops reading Gordon's piece.