My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.