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Nickel-and-dimeing us for access to content made less useful by those very restrictions simply isn’t appealing. Newspapers can’t entice us into small payment systems, because we care too much about our conversation with one another, and they can’t force us into such systems, because Off the Bus and Pro Publica and Gawker and Global Voices and Ohmynews and Spot.us and Smoking Gun all understand that not only is a news cartel unworkable, but that if one existed, their competitive advantage would be in attacking it rather than defending it.
The threat from micropayments isn’t that they will come to pass. The threat is that talking about them will waste our time, and now is not the time to be wasting time. The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.
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