News Corp is planning to introduce micro-payments for individual articles from the Wall Street Journal. Some may see this as a bold move to embrace a new business model, one that many (dying) newspapers are thinking about, but haven't yet had the courage to actually implement.

Without going into the intricacies of price and scaling (managing editor of WSJ, Robert Thomson, says the price would be “rightfully high,” whatever that means), I see a very simple problem that will kill this idea right from the start. If you put a price - any price - on an article in the Wall Street Journal, people will not be able to share it. Sites like Mashable won't be able to link to it. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon...any content behind a paywall will receive zero traffic from all these social sites.

And that fact alone is enough for the entire system to fail, because the benefit of receiving money from a small portion of the readers will be outweighed by the fact that fewer people will see the content (the additional consequence is the fact that other publications will inevitably grab the opportunity offer similar content for free). Not to mention that free content - besides not costing you money - has the advantage of being simple to use, i.e. the readers don't have to go through the additional payment step.

Perhaps someone over at News Corp has thought about this; maybe they're planning some sort of system that lets paying customers receive the content early, and then sets it free after a certain period of time. I doubt even this would work, however, because on the Internet a couple of hours late is too late. A paywall - any kind of paywall - will not solve newspapers' problems. The WSJ and other publications are, of course, welcome to try.

See also: 10 Ways Newspapers Are Using Social Media to Save the Industry