Making money from online journalism is, thus, not just a matter of saying "Let's all start charging."

One of the problems associated with introducing a micropayments system is balancing the transaction cost against the sums collected.

Thus as Robert Pickard says

To create the best industry wide effects, a micropayment payment system would need to include as many papers as possible

but adds that

The fact that a consortium is currently being sought only among the major players illustrates, however, that such a system would be cost inefficient because content from smaller papers would attract fewer transactions and be more expensive to service.

This is one problem with any system but another is picking the correct model.As Robert continues

The biggest pricing challenge, however, is that some articles will be more valuable than others and will be most sought after by consumers. This means newspapers will have to figure out BEFOREHAND which stories fall into those categories and they will have to decide what prices to charge for them.

These are not necessarily skills that media organisations have and

It will require fundamental rethinking of the value chain, what content is offered, and how it is produced. It will also require significant thought about what's in it for consumers--something that is glaringly missing from current discussions of starting online payments.