Until last Wednesday morning I was no more interested in the notion of online news monetisation than you were. And now I am quite interested in it, but you’re still not. And yet I’m going to write about it anyway. So then this column, in which I will worry about no longer having a job in two years’ time, is likely to prove, in and of itself, to be another nail in the newspaper’s coffin. (Go on, take it outside now, box it up and bury it in a hole in the garden, like the pet gerbil you moved into the garage because it smelt, which then froze to death — wait, no, that was me.) They’ve been saying for years that the newspaper as we know it will eventually disappear under the threat of digital manifestations, but they never really had a time frame. In that regard it was a bit like global warming: it is Armageddon, it is the end of days, but it might not happen for a bit so let’s just not think about it and with a bit of luck it is our children and grandchildren who will really suffer. (Ironically, my long-term plan for climate change was always to get rich enough to buy farmland on high ground so that I can raise my own food and keep a small private army to protect it from the neighbours — but if there aren’t going to be any papers then I’m not going to be able to get rich, so when the flood waters come I will simply drown.) But now Rupert Murdoch is having high-level meetings (I’m not sure he has any other kind) about how and when to charge for online content. How, in other words, to monetise the online edition. How, if you put it bluntly, to monetise me.

Monetise. It is not a word I had heard before. I don’t work in that sector. I don’t even want to hear about that sector. If you’d asked me a week ago what “monetise” was, I’d have said it was a fizzy drink made from coins. Ha ha. But then I’m a hilarious guy. That’s why they pay me the big potatoes. FOR NOW.

But soon they will have to monetise me. For be sure, where Mr Murdoch (who is the chairman of News Corp, which owns The Times, this space, and my sorry arse) leads, the rest will follow. And newspapers will disappear. Indeed, the closure of thelondonpaper was announced on Thursday. And the Editor of The Guardian has been saying for some time that the newspaper is already a dead medium. And if you’ve looked at The Guardian recently, you’ll see why.

So then they will monetise online (“Mmm, ice-cold Monetise, straight from the fridge”) and you’ll have to start paying. And they’re meeting now to decide exactly how. And if it’s me then you’ll only be able to read a piece like this by hitting some button and paying, I don’t know, 5p or something. And, oh God, I just can’t imagine why anyone would bother when there’s so much out there that’s free — some of it with pictures of naked ladies smoking.

I only know all this because on Wednesday morning, strolling on Hampstead Heath, I bumped into Caitlin Moran, eating ice cream with her kids.

“Lord-a-mercy, Giles, it’s all over,” she said. “They’re deciding what to monetise [it was the first time I’d heard the word]. They’re going to discover how unpopular we are! There’s a thing by our pieces online that says “recommend” [I didn’t know this] and if not enough people click it we’re going to be taken outside and shot. Like old horses!”

“Well there’s not much we can do about it,” I said. “We’ll just have to open a shop or something.”

“That’s OK for you to say!” She shrieked. “I’ve got two children. I haven’t got time to open a shop! We have to turn ourselves into self-facilitating media nodes. The column is dead! Times Online is going to want us to shout brief, pithy things into a webcam three times an hour. You can put away your bag of adjectives right this second. You’ve got to tweet. You’ve got to have a website. You’ve got to put enough e-traffic through The Times via your own independent web presence that you visibly attract advertising revenue, thus making yourself digitally indispensable!”

And then she tore all her clothes off and ran across the park screaming: “Flee! Flee for your lives!” And her youngest daughter fell out of a tree.

And I suppose Caitlin’s right. This kind of 1,200-word ramble isn’t going to work on screen. It’ll make your eyes bleed. They will have to introduce some piece of technology that saves you all the waffle and directs you straight to the jokes and, oh God, what if it can’t find any?

Then again, if it is all going to be podcasts and twitter-feeds perhaps that’s no bad thing. What takes up time in my working life, such as it is, is carving out these longish things that vaguely cohere. It’s exhausting. If all I have to do in the new digital news forum is shout “bloody elf ’n’ safety — it makes you sick!” into the lens on top of my computer and it goes straight into The Times, then that’s pretty fabulous. It’ll be just like being a cab driver, except without having to drive around.

Although I suppose there would be no real value added in the shouty person being me. You could just get a cab driver. So I need to digitise my “me-ness”, thus making my witless podshout and blogorrhoea uniquely monetisable.

I’ve started by tweeting. Signed up on Wednesday and picked up 1,000-odd “followers” in the first couple of hours, which, at the risk of causing offence, is considerably better than Jesus managed. What I’m going to do is broadcast 140-character columns (about 20 words, the maximum allowed) throughout the day, based on online news that is not yet in the paper. Ha, I’ll give them “monetised”.

And I’m going to review restaurants on Twitter, too. Live, as I eat. As I sit in each restaurant I will tell you what I’ve ordered, then what it’s like as I eat it, what I think of the staff and my fellow diners, all that stuff. Restaurants will be able to go online the moment they see me walk in (if they want to) and find out if I’m enjoying myself. They will know — if they choose to “follow” me — exactly what I thought of the starters, even before they have cleared the plate away.

Teehee, what fun. I’m already enjoying the thought of a crap waiter forgetting my glass of water (they ALWAYS forget the water) and only “remembering” when my complaint on Twitter is relayed to him by phone from the office. And if I can do it, then you can do it. Just go to twitter.com, sign up, click to follow my page (@gilescoren) and then start tweeting your meals as they happen. Imagine the carnage: every duff moment at every table in every restaurant in Britain will be relayed instantly to the Times restaurant critic. Restaurants will never be the same again. And restaurant criticism should, with a bit of luck, survive the death of newspapers.

The fun starts today: I have a table booked in a famous London restaurant at 1.30pm, the review begins at 1.31 . . .

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