Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.