I'd be happy to pay, under these conditions: 1) payment per article, at prices comparable to aggregate ad income; and 2) payments accepted via Bitcoin, or other methods which can be anonymized.
Well, ads are currently placed through a micropayment system. And there's no reason that customers would need to make individual decisions, any more than advertisers do.
Unfortunately, this kind of micropayment will not work for most people and perhaps more importantly will lead to less revenue for the publisher.
Clary Shirky has written about why micropayments [0] is the wrong model for consuming content more than a decade ago.
[0] http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html