They should sell their presses and go to a Print on demand model. They could have special NYT dispensers at kiosks that allow you to choose which stories you want to read and makes a custom newspaper with ads targeted to match for each patron. Then over time it should learn each readers tastes and recommend stories. Google news for the unwired world. Vendors would rent the specialized printing machines from NYT for the privileged of being able to sell the worlds premier news paper.
Setting up those kiosks, even in New York City alone, would require a massive capital expenditure; the NYT company doesn't have the cash to spend, and this is not exactly the best time to raise investment for such a project.
And a-la-carte pricing is actually bad for newspaper profits. First of all, if the customer has to look at each headline and think, "do I want to spend another penny for this story?", the customer is likely to pay less. Second, aggregation lets the newspaper profit from people who value different articles at different rates, as Clay Shirky explains (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.ht...):
"Imagine a newspaper sold in three separate sections - news, business, and sports. Now imagine that Curly would pay a nickel to get the news section, a dime for business, and a dime for sports; Moe would pay a dime each for news and business but only a nickel for sports; and Larry would pay a dime, a nickel, and a dime. If the newspaper charges a nickel a section, each man will buy all three sections, for 15 cents. If it prices each section at a dime, each man will opt out of one section, paying a total of 20 cents. If the newspaper aggregates all three sections together, however, Curly, Moe and Larry will all agree to pay 25 cents for the whole, even though they value the parts differently."
iTunes makes money by unpackaging songs and selling alcarte why not news?
The POD device could offer other printed materials as well and you could sell it to the news stands as a way to avoid buying a bunch of inventory that is going to go stale in 1 to 30 days anyways.
What that article is really saying is that you could charge more for a customized paper even if it had less content and people wouldn't care.
