I add that $1 a week is probably out of touch with reality. It assumes that people goes to Wired.com to browse articles at least few times per week. I might be wrong, but people lands there coming from sites like HN or from Google searches. I'm among this group of people. That means that we read a few articles per month, maybe none at all. Paying even as little as $1 for something I might use and maybe not is out of question. Imagine if I'd have to do that for any random web site I land to. Unfortunately for them the very existence of the hyperlink and the zillion of other news outlets makes paywalled site an as sustainable business as paid web browsers.

Still, if I could pay on demand, 1 cent per article, I'll consider it. Show me an abstract first and remember that I'll remember if your content is really worth that cent. If you think it's tiny, divide the price of a paper newpaper by the number of articles it's made of and we get to that order of magnitude.