It's called a subscription. Micropayments don't work for journalism, because there's too much of a difference between the set of articles that people are likel

It's called a subscription. Micropayments don't work for journalism, because there's too much of a difference between the set of articles that people are likely to press the "pay 10cents" button on (or even read) and the set of articles that are necessary for civil society to function. That's why journalists were almost disgusted by buzzfeed's "big board", the screen showing current traffic numbers for all articles: it encourages the sort of cat content that drives traffic for the least amount of effort. As one example, there was the widely-shared frustration of one journalist on Twitter who had been investigating that Trump Jr. meeting with the russians for months, only to be scooped by Jr. making it public himself when he got wind of the investigation. It's not just that this journalist's work wouldn't be rewarded under a micropayment model. It also shows that some stories take an amount of work that I think people don't know about. Even if his article had become a hit, could it ever pull in as much money as the dozens of listicles you could pump out in those months of work? Editors at high-quality publishers still tend to want to do the right thing. Subscriptions give them a bit of cover to send someone on an assignment that they deem important. Once every articles' costs and revenue become explicit data points on a colourful chart, even those owners that are currently willing to look the other way as long as the overall numbers make some sense will find it hard to resist the temptation to point at the outliers and ask if it's really necessary to spend a six-digit sum on that investigation of bribery at the Backwater County (MI) Department of Public Health when it only got 10,000 microflatters of 5 cents each, all from residents of East Nowhere (MI), especially since advertisers stopped being interested in readers from East Nowhere once they all started spending their money on Heroin.