The end of subscriptions?

BusinessWeek Online paints a rosy financial picture for the newspaper of the future... if it can adapt to the Internet revolution. Based on Apple's iTunes model, newspapers may sooner than later find that selling content article by article will ultimately become more profitable than selling subscriptions. Online news readers tend to read "info chunks" of preference as opposed to traditionally reading a newspaper front to back. News aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google are already striking deals to spider into various publications' paid content, where readers are offered the option of paying for the article they would like to read and only that article. For this to work more smoothly on the Web, a pre-planned system of micropayments, in which paid sites and content that a user accesses will be automatically added to a monthly bill, will have to be erected. This system could theoretically lead to the division of content into articles, photos, graphics, etc., each hit receiving a small sum. Since analysts see this system as the next step in news reading, newspapers would be wise to decide how to best package their content.

Source: BusinessWeek Online