At a higher level, even the specialist journals are still essentially performing an aggregator function. The most well-researched, insightful reporting is still just a recapitulation of something else, some a set of facts or opinions that exists independently of the reporting. Journalists do not create content in the same way as authors, musicians, software developers, etc. They go out, gather information of interest to their audience, filter it, repackage it, and distribute it to their readers.

Traditional journalism is effectively information retail. The internet threatens it not by making content free - there is no copyright on reality; the content is already free - but by connecting audiences directly to primary sources. The main advantage that journalism still maintains - a critical and thorough filtering function - is now being challenged by new infrastructure developments, social networking platforms, Twitter, increasing maturity of the blogosphere, etc. These factors diminish news reporting as a packaged product, and return it to the context of an open conversation.

What I think Murdoch and Hinton are really attacking is not news content being made available for free, but the internet revealing that news isn't actually "content" at all. Their business model isn't undergoing a paradigm shift; it's simply going away. Apart from shifting their operations to an entirely different industry, fighting this battle is the only option they have.

Micro-payments are like any other pay-wall -- they imply throwing away the vast majority of the traffic you get from search engines and links.

They've never been rolled out in a serious way, because advertisers are currently paying enough for the unfiltered masses to outweigh the revenue that could be generated by those readers that survive a pay-wall.

As for why those with pay-walls don't use the micro-transaction model -- they can't charge people for what they actually read without the per-story price being large enough to trigger that discrete psychological purchase decision that micro-payments' tiny size was envisioned to avoid.

E.g. An average person paying $5/mo for the WSJ might read 50 stories a month. Ask them for a dime a story and they'll read fewer, reducing your revenue. With subscription pricing they essentially make all that stuff the reader doesn't really want appear to be a feature that, for whatever reason, they do value enough to pay for.