It's been tried many times and it always fails. How can you know if the article is worth 50c before seeing it? As you said, it's a random entity you've never heard of before.

Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism:

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-b...

I do agree with the spirit of your point, but there's an easy counterargument:

How do you know that the next month worth of articles from the publisher you are subscribed to is worth the fee before seeing it?

There is a such a thing as building trust in a brand, this is not a barrier to micropayments.

I wonder how many of the people who say they'd pay 50c would actually pay 50c if they could.

I'd say I read an average of 10 articles per day (with various definitions of "read"). I can't see myself actually spending $5 a day.

At that point I'd be better off getting a few news site subscriptions, but I also highly dislike the idea of committing to a single news source, and committing to a few isn't much of an improvement.

Of course, you could introduce a "tip after you read" mechanism, which I assume would generate probably about 50c per article, and probably motivate various "remember to tip" mechanisms that (I suspect) the same people who say they'd pay/tip would hate with a passion.

You don’t but you have to put a base price on content for it to work. The point of a $0.50 access fee is that all articles individually would cost $0.50. Then you charge a subscription to unlimited access.

No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles and consumers like you for some reason want to attach a per-word-price for each article.

Implement a legitimate system and people will use it. Implement a system with work arounds and people will use the work arounds.