I have no idea what the proposed "secret sauce" will be, and the article touches on many good point, but here's the big unavoidable problem: this is all wishful

I have no idea what the proposed "secret sauce" will be, and the article touches on many good point, but here's the big unavoidable problem: this is all wishful thinking. Usable micropayments and customers paying for online articles will not emerge simply as a result of sufficient hand-wringing. What will make micropayments happen isnot disenfranchised journalists or charity thereupon by techno-utopians. Instead it will come from something with much different and forward-looking goals, like Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually has the properties to make micropayments viable in a way that anything resembling traditional economic payments simply cannot because of overhead (especially considering fraud). However Bitcoin still has to cross the chasm to mainstream usage before we can even dream of such benefits trickling down to online journalism, and I doubt it will because of the next problem... Content is cheap! The article misattributes the state of online content as caused by the "original sin" of starting advertising, as if that decision happened in a vacuum. But of course from the very beginning the web dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and distribution. Initially there was at least a technical barrier to entry, but that has come down over time as well to the current state of Medium, Facebook, Instagram. The reason people expect free content is not because someone decided it had to be ad-supported, but because having an audience is the first step towards any type of monetization. Once you have an audience you can leverage it in all sorts of ways, some involving charging (eg. The Economist) and some involving branding/funnel-building (eg. Signal vs. Noise), but most people do not, and therefore there will always be a stream of people ready to put out free content just to get noticed. The fact that this dynamic is killing journalism as we know it is not going to change any incentives or behavior. It's not enough to say "all we need is X to save journalism", you have to explain who is going to build X, why they will do it, and why will users adopt it. I don't believe that enough people are bothered by the current state of affairs that getting rid of advertising, or paying journalists directly will resonate in any meaningful way. That doesn't mean people won't pay for content—obviously they do pay for content—but you have to give them something they think is worth paying for. That's not to take anything away from ambitious attempts at alternative funding methods, but fighting against the fundamental market dynamics is not the way to do it, you have to come up with ideas and concepts that resonate with current trends and modes of thinking.