With continued turmoil in the advertising market, people who work at newspapers and magazines are wondering if micropayments will save them, with recent speculation in this direction by David Sarno of the LA Times, David Carr of the NY Times, and Walter Isaacson in Time magazine. Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. To understand why not, there are two key pieces of background.