There easily could be: OpenID, which many many large and small sites are using to share authentication. Although I’m not sure that easing registration is really a very big problem in the scheme of things here. Asking the browser manufacturers to incorporate micropayment technology also dooms you to the long upgrade cycle of that software (we’re still serving a very large population of IE6 users where I work; many customers seem to take several years to upgrade a browser).

Micropayments are never going to be “child’s play”, if they were, we’d have seen them crop up somewhere by now (for example, across Yahoo properties or WordPress blogs some other large federated network). It’s a surprisingly tough problem from both a tax/legal and technical point of view. It’s also socially hard: people actually really DO have a problem paying out tiny amounts in nickels and dimes. The iTunes $0.99 per song/app model seems to be about the right threshold for a small unit of digital value.

I do think Drew’s last point holds the seed of something very interesting (which Xark’s explored at length): one solution might be to bundle “subscribables” in some way. NYT.com + ESPN.com + 2 Pay Per View events per month. Or an LATimes.com subscription + a Netflix subscription. You could imagine a cross-media sports subscription that blended online access with, say, tickets to my city’s soccer team’s games.

Because once something like that is in place, folding in a micropayments system is child’s play. You could even start off with a purely donation based system. If a reader visited a lot, you could maybe make a harder push (“you really seem to like us, won’t you help us produce more great content?”). Yeah, maybe you’re skeptical that a “like this article, click here to pay 5cents to help us produce more” button could generate revenue. But it’s better than nothing for a start, and no one has really tried to make it EASY to pay money, which is far more the holdup than the actual cost to the reader. And it works for things like public radio.

If my browser had a built in counter of how much I’d spent/donated that day/week/month, I’d have little problem paying out tiny sums for good reads. The holdup is that my browser doesn’t have that, and instead newspapers are still banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out how to get me to shell out subscriptions that cover ONLY their website, instead of what I really want and would be willing to pay to subscribe to: the entire web.

That was about 7 years ago. I rarely go to Salon unless someone links to it. Part of the reason people read a site is because they are familiar with it and know they will regularly find interesting content. Once that link is broken, the readers may never come back and you have truncated your relevance for small and temporary financial gain.

You’ve convinced me, though, that it would be the worst form of corporate welfare.

The immediate future of journalism scares me, but you’re right on a central point: that newspapers continuing on the web will allow them and their staffs to be a part of the evolving solution.

That in itself is big.