Poke Her Face

Music You've probably read this already, but just in case. Caitlin Moran has her "Almost Famous" moment with Lada Gaga:

"It’s not so much that I am now almost certainly going to be fired. Since I found out how much the model Sophie Anderton used to earn as a high-class call girl, my commitment to continuing as a writer at The Times has been touch and go anyway, to be honest.

It’s more that I am genuinely devastated to have blown it so spectacularly. Since I saw Gaga play Poker Face at Glastonbury Festival last year, I have been a properly, hawkishly devoted admirer.

It's a brilliant piece of writing, emotional, exciting and has an unexpected twist in the middle which sends it in another direction. If there's a better pop interview this year, I'll be very surprised. Probably deserves a Pulitzer.

But, as Scott Matthewman notes, come June/July when the great Murdoch paywall is built around The Times website, it's also the kind of writing which will fall into obscurity on-line pretty quickly:

"Online, I would have to read a lot more content from the Times’ website than just Moran’s article to make the £1 for 24 hours’ access of comparable value to buying a print newspaper. And to be honest, that’s not really how my reading consumption on the web works: I tend to read articles from all sorts of newspaper sites, blogs and other web sources. A lot of that comes to me via Google Reader, through which I have subscribed to web feeds from a whole array of different websites. An increasing amount, though, comes at the recommendation of others, people I communicate with regularly and trust via Twitter and Facebook. Likewise, I share links, such as Moran’s, that I think people may like to read."

Of course my reasons for not buying The Times are ideological. Which is a completely different, and not inconsistent, discussion for some other time.