Today is a small milestone in media history. If you never travel through the capital city, you may not notice. Yet bear with me: this particular straw is blown by a wind that chills us all.

For the first time in its 180-year history, the London Evening Standard becomes free. Scuttling commuters will no longer throw 50p to street salesmen (occasionally copping a dodgy umbrella as incentive). Instead we will pick up this substantial newspaper, with well-paid writers and ambitions towards gravitas, as if it were one of the fluffier freesheets littering the Tube floors. The owner believes that doing this, and doubling the print run, will create a monopoly that — through advertising revenue — will turn a profit.

My first concern, I must admit, was for the tribe of Standard sellers: part of the capital’s human landscape with their fingerless grey gloves and mournful cries of “Eeeeeeningstanner!”. Most will be paid to hand it out free, although the six that I talked to last week all fear for their income. The second thought was for small newsagents who will miss the revenue generated by workers dashing in for an afternoon paper and a Snickers bar to sweeten it. The third was for the Standard itself: if the gamble fails there are a few of its writers that I will miss.

But the fourth concern was bigger. Huge, in fact. It was about the whole “business model” of free-ness. Call me a reactionary, call me a Murdoch lackey, but the fact is that, after a vague flirtation with the concept that “information wants to be free” and years of internet surfing, I feel a sense of revolt.

It’s been fun: like a jammed fruit machine spewing free tokens or a whisky-galore shipwreck. But it’s got to stop. Content — whether music, films, pictures, news or prose — can’t be free and flourish. The music and movie industries are fighting: journalism, after the ego trip of gaining millions of online readers, is following. It has to. There is no alternative.

The labourer is worthy of his hire, time is money, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Pay nothing and you get dumb (or worse, venal) monkeys. Nothing costs nothing. And to do a straightforward deal is better than to endure an oblique and more sinister levy: the selling of your attention to hidden persuaders.

It is ironic how many of the rising generation of students constantly tell pollsters that they plan to work in the media or creative arts, yet that same generation tends to believe that content — hard work created by other people — is free. Pirated music, films, news, photographs, cartoons and carefully researched or created prose are theirs at the click of a mouse. For the owners to ask for payment is a diabolical liberty. The young are conditioned to think this way because that is how the internet feels: a web invented by academics rather than business people, its default setting is “free”.

There is an economic philosophy that says that this is the future. The editor of the American magazine Wired, Chris Anderson, wrote a book saying that everything, once digitised, is free. He thinks that newspapers will disappear and that “going out looking” for news is nonsense because it “comes to me in many ways: via Twitter, my inbox, my RSS feed, through conversations”.

For him media will become a mere hobby: already, he says, most news is “created by amateurs”. He sees no problem in freeing us all from the tyranny of accuracy, professional research, training, care and, presumably, legality into a gossipy twilight of twittered, undigested rumour, half-baked plagiarism and urban myth.

Well, not me. Blogs are fun, with a pinch of salt; “user-generated content” offers a window on other minds. But when the world is going crazy I prefer something more solid than tweets.

I didn’t buy Mr Anderson’s book, obviously. I read chunks of it online, free. Just as we all do every day, during what I think we will soon look back on as a strange interregnum: a Star-Trekky timewarp between the age of paper and the age of subscription. I don’t say this just because News International — The Times’s parent company — looks likely to be the first big organisation to ask a payment from online readers. Nobody told me to say this. It just seems, as Basil Fawlty would say, the bleedin’ obvious.

Content is not cost free. Writing is work. Musicianship involves cost and labour, art is not innately free, nor the infrastructure of news reporting. Until food, clothes, housing and transport are doled out free, content-makers need to be paid. The theory that advertising revenues will cover that, in any medium, is tosh. A hundred years ago, perhaps, adverts were a delightful novelty: in 2009 consumers are quicker on the button. We fast-foward at 32x through TV ads, hitting the play button as Coronation Street starts again; we screen out pop-ups, hardly see banner ads and go for the little “x” in the top righthand corner before we even notice the branding. Advertising does have returns, but not enough. As for sponsorship, “advertorial” and other subtle tricks, they carry more sinister dangers. As a reader, I do not wish to be delivered up, gagged and bound, to a commercial or political paymaster who has the writer in his sway.

Free has been fun, for a while. But when both Mr Murdoch and Tom Curley, of Associated Press, accuse Google of being “content kleptomaniacs” as they did at the World Media Summit , they are not unreasonable. When the music and movie industries get tough on pirates, they are not selfish fat cats: they are defending a human value. Sure, some creatives give their work free, but that is their choice . And yes, the BBC’s vast “free” website muddies the waters — but come off it! We pay for that, lavishly, through a tax on television sets.

Here’s a little story that the US Congress heard (yeah, got it off the net). James Moroney, the publisher of The Dallas Morning News, related his negotiations with Amazon. If he licenses his content to their electronic reader, Kindle, “they want 70 per cent of subscription revenue, I get 30 per cent”.

On top of that, they demand the right to resell his intellectual property to any portable device. So only three dollars in ten would go to the expensively researched and written newspaper, to sign away its product for ever; the lion’s share is for the gadget provider. Intellectual property and its makers are considered worth next to nothing.

Indeed, often enough the receptive public thinks them worth nothing at all, not even the price of a fag. Does that seem fair, to you?

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