I'm sure that the NYT would love this setup. On the other hand, they're having a hard enough sell getting people to sign up for _free_.
I simply don't believe that people mentally give the average article any value significantly above zero. Sure, I would pay .04 for a great op-ed article or for a quality book review that I'm interested in, but I really don't think the average story at the NYT is that much better than I can read on a dozen blogs for free.
To the average reader, the average story on the NYT is not nearly as valuable as the synopses written by those whose point of view the reader values. However, to the writers of those synposes and editorials, who drive the New York Times articles to the top of TechMeme and Hacker News, the articles are quite valuable, as they provide a launching point for their own writing. Perhaps there's a business model there.
Maybe, in the end that's still the same advertising based revenue that NYT is having problems with, except that the problem of making money off of ads is farmed off to the smaller blogs instead the paper itself. It may be that the smaller, more flexible blogs are able to hit on a balance that is able to fund both themselves and their news sources, but my suspicion is that if the ads aren't enough to support NYT on their own, they still won't be able to support it when they're spread out among a bunch of smaller blogs. If might work as an extra bit of revenue, but I don't see it becoming a main business.
It does not address the problem number one with micropayments - that there is a mental cost for any money transaction and if you are really talking about micro payments then this mental cost can easily dominate the cost of the whole transaction.
Rather than micropayments, I think there's a need for micro-tipping. I may not want to make the mental effort to decide whether to pay 4 cents for an article before I read it, but I often feel grateful to the author of a piece after I read it. The problem is that there is no convenient way to act on that impulse -- no way to make a quick micro tip. An upvote on Hacker News and Reddit serves this purpose, but there is no money involved and the upvote link lives on the aggregator's site instead of the content provider's site.
I simply don't believe that people mentally give the average article any value significantly above zero. Sure, I would pay .04 for a great op-ed article or for a quality book review that I'm interested in, but I really don't think the average story at the NYT is that much better than I can read on a dozen blogs for free.