The newspaper industry is collapsing, and publishers, journalists, and editors are in an understandable panic. One of the various remedies that has recently gained currency—if you’ll excuse the pun—is called micropayments. They feature prominently in Time’s current cover story, How to Save Your Newspaper.

In You Can’t Sell News By The Slice, the NY Times explains:¹

Micropayments are systems that make it easy to pay small amounts of money. (Your subway card is an example.) You could pay a nickel to read an article, or a dime for a whole day’s newspaper.

The prescription of micropayments is, in fact, how not to save a newspaper. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do, akin to a medieval doctor’s insistence that the King’s illness can be solved with the application of more leeches.  Clay Shirky² explains why small payments won’t save publishers:

The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong. The result is that small payment systems don’t survive contact with online markets, because we express our hatred of small payments by switching to alternatives, whether supported by subscription or subsidy.

Both pieces make many other interesting points, and are highly recommended if the fields of e-commerce and/or publishing interest you.

1. Once upon a time, I owned not one but two of the Slate umbrellas that Kinsley mentions, earned through my early patronage of Microsoft’s online magazine. Sadly, one was destroyed and the other was lost during a move. I would absolutely love to have another one, if anyone reading this is ever in a position to raid that closet of leftovers. [↩]
2. I’ve previously covered, admiringly, some of Shirky’s thoughts on these topics. [↩]