Up, with a rush, go more paywalls around newspaper web sites. The Northern Echo in Darlington and the Washington Post in DC march in step. And then there’s the Winnipeg Free Press, which has built a different kind of wall around its newsroom. This one sells you everything for C$16.99 a month – but, crucially, it also sells single articles at 27 cents a time. Maybe reading the news can become like filling a supermarket basket for occasional shoppers. Maybe there are iTunes of glory here. Maybe Winnipeg is the future…

Don’t bet on it, of course. The idea of charging upfront for an article you’ll only read once – or may not even finish – is pretty uncertain. So is a 27 cent price tag. And yet the subscription business itself flows as well as ebbs in the struggle for newspaper survival.

Newsrooms can raise the cash to keep going by blanket charging from behind a wall: the Murdoch solution. Or they can erect no walls and bank on rising ad revenue to turn red into black: the Mail Online and Guardian solution. Or – the middle way – they can have a wall but allow 10 or more free visits behind it every month, thus keeping ad numbers high and bringing in subs from devoted, regular readers: the FT, Telegraph and Economist solution – now followed in Darlington and on Capitol Hill. But is there a Winnipeg fourth way? In some ways, to my mind, the most interesting departure is small, thoughtful and British. Welcome to 1Pass at The Browser.

The Browser is an elegant little enterprise started seven years ago by Robert Cottrell (late of the Economist, FT and Indy). He was, and is, a compulsive reader. He scours the internet constantly for good things to savour – not, he says, the “4% cent of entertaining rubbish or the 95% without redeeming features”, but the 1% that intelligent general readers might devour if it came to their attention. Cottrell’s Browser (for a $20-a-year sub) aims to recommend five or six select pieces a day, and made a promising business of it until paywalls began to grow everywhere, shutting off open access to quality as well as tat. Somehow, to survive, there had to be a way of scaling the walls. 1Pass does that job.

You get a button on your screen. You put a month’s worth of money – or whatever you think necessary – into a personal 1Pass account. And then you can buy the articles from the Economist, the FT, the New York Review of Books and Foreign Affairs that come up on the Browser list (standing by to add Newsweek too). 1Pass is up and working now, gathering subscriptions.

It is one way through the FT and Economist walls, offering something specific beyond their free access limits. The fact of Browser choice means it’s worth making the jump and adding extra paid articles. The scope for expansion – into, say, a service that allows wider roaming beyond paywalls and their narrow limits on open access – is obvious.

Everything you find beyond the wall has a price. Member papers and mags can control 1Pass for themselves: no Facebook or Google hegemony. In embryo, this is the way paywalls become flexible and allow readers to seek out what’s important, to follow a research thread – but without having to go the whole subscription hog when they hit an access limit. The costs are what you make them; so (attention Rupert!) are the rewards. PwC research reckons digital newspaper revenue is heading for $19bn in four years on a steep upward trajectory. We’d already seen almost 700 US papers go the paywall route even before the Post took the plunge.

Perhaps 1Pass is just another fork in the road. Perhaps single sales can’t make a huge difference. Perhaps the iTunes model hasn’t been able to stave off Spotify. Perhaps, perhaps … But somewhere out there someone may already have discovered the best of two swirling worlds. Stick, twist – or pass?

• This article was amended on 31 May to correct an error. The Browser subscription is $20 per year, not per month as previously stated.