I am delighted that you are reading this column. I am more delighted if, to do so, you bought a real newspaper, imagining it crafted by nocturnal trolls smearing ink on dead trees in a mountain cave, delivered each morning by rose-cheeked Hovis boys on bikes. If, on the other hand, you are reading it on screen then you are not paying for my work. You are getting it scot-free. Except for a dribble of advertising, you are not contributing to the Guardian's precarious finances, or to mine. You are also giving me the uncomfortable feeling that, if you were not reading for free, you would not bother at all. As Johnny Cash said, "Damn your eyes".

Rupert Murdoch has now declared the free ride over. His titles – the Times, Sunday Times and others – will be obtainable in some shape or form online only through a credit card number. Such charges are already levied for the nether regions of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. But attempts to put mainline news and comment behind a "paywall" have in the past foundered, because of the ease of circumvention and the bruised egos of writers suddenly denied the bulk of their "market".

Murdoch's move is comparable to his attack on union-led newspaper costs when he moved his British titles to Wapping in 1985. Then the rest of the industry jeered and rushed to undermine him, while privately praying for him to succeed. When he did they rushed to imitate him. Britain's newspapers enjoyed two decades of prosperity and choice unparalleled in the western world.

Now Murdoch wants to transform not costs but revenues. Getting history to repeat itself will not be easy. The bogus idea that "news is free information" has captivated a generation of media managers. It is like saying fruit is free food or wind is free energy. As James Harkin, the author of Cyburbia, wrote in the Guardian last week, newspapers were "seduced by the evangelical gee-whizzery of the electro-hippies". Editorial machismo was boosted by multimillion "unique hits". The truth was that online newspapers were free-sheets for slow learners.

In theory online subscription should offer a torrent of cash, provided newspapers can bear the apparent shame of plummeting hits. The New York Times paywall generated $10m a year, while it lasted. Even if so-called readership falls by 90%, 250,000 devotees at, say, £100 a year could mean life or death to a publication.

Consultants on both sides of the Atlantic are now working round the clock on how best to design paywalls, portals, "freemiums", micro-charges and pay-per-reads. Lawyers are meanwhile fighting the oldest game in publishing, how to guard copyrights (at least for 24 hours). If Dickens and Kipling could crack it, I am sure they can.

But what are they really guarding? Trinity Mirror's boss, Sly Bailey, reacted to Murdoch's announcement by asking: "Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?" The answer can only be to ensure that "the same thing" is not available elsewhere, that the product is unique, be it news and analysis, comment, gossip or sex advice.

I was once asked by a streetwise Californian what business I was in. When I said I wrote for the Guardian, he looked glum. "Great brand," he said, "pity about the product." He regarded it as a tragedy that a popular ideology, that of world liberalism, should be tied to a dead forest. The Guardian should not be selling newspapers, he said, it should be selling liberals.

At present the newspaper industry is like the British army retreating on Dunkirk. As before Wapping, it asks only how many boats might there be for survivors, two titles or perhaps three? Erecting paywalls may delay the retreat, but I sense that as long as online news media are selling just information and comment, they will be vulnerable to Bailey's web attrition.

The key must be to learn the lesson of the most tightly competitive medium of all: popular music. It has cast off its enslavement to recording studios and recast itself, almost in Victorian mode, as a mass movement for live audiences. Music online is all but free. Live costs a fortune. Young people will pay more for a gig in a club than for a Led Zeppelin CD.

This summer I have found myself attending four live events: the Hay Festival, Glastonbury, the CLA Game Fair and the Welsh Eisteddfod. All were packed. They had almost nothing in common, other than vast crowds being parted from considerable sums of money in the cause of affinity. While television companies and online projects ailed, live was booming.

If newspapers were anywhere at these events it was, crazily, as sponsors rather than profit-takers. They have let the torch of cultural championship pass to a new generation of promoters and impresarios. Local newspapers are quietly dying when they should be staging everything from commercial fairs to sporting events and arts and book festivals. There is money in all of them. Newspapers should not be investing in fancy printing presses but in the "long-tail" economics of live enterprise, with the printed word as a mere core activity.

To my Californian friend the Guardian was a life-style, a niche, an affinity group. Whatever the point of entry, somewhere behind a paywall was a beckoning club, privileged access not just to news and comment but to a galaxy of media brands, events, concerts, courses, seminars, conferences, tours and related discounts and dating agencies. To pay was not to read, it was to join. A Kansas publisher of my acquaintance claims to make more margin on seminars than he does on his magazines.

British newspapers are stunned and traumatised. The recession has ripped the bottom from their boat. I am sure they will refloat somehow, as they did at the end of the 19th century with the advent of rotary presses and mass readership. There will always be rich men (or rich foundations) to support some of them. Even in their printed form they remain user-friendly products for readers fed up with looking at screens every hour of the day.

But to be secure a media operation must entice an audience to enjoy what the web cannot supplant, a paid-for exclusivity and an opportunity for a unique participative experience. Like other purveyors of culture, such as musicians, actors, writers and even church people, newspapers will have to generate new markets for their wares. Goodbye Guardian, welcome the Guardian Experience.