Thumbs down on small payments, says Shirkey

Clay Shirky: Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers:

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition.

What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers;

All of which seems sensible to me with regard to commodified news. But what about other sorts of publishing and archival marketeering? He's at FASTforward09, and seems not yet to have moderated his comments. Here's one I left earlier today:

Clay, do you see no role for microeconomics for vended content? One area where one has imagined it proving useful is academic treasure houses like JSTOR, ProjectMUSE, which simply close themselves off to potential readers by operating within an institutional subscription format.

What sort of model would you prefer?