Twenty-five years ago last week, USA Today was born. Boasting color photos, short and simple stories and a knack for encapsulating any and every aspect of society into graphics, the "McPaper" marked a radical departure in format from other newspapers of the time.

Just as notably, USA Today introduced a new distribution model for a newspaper. It was found in hotels and newsstands — but not in mailboxes. Instead of relying primarily on individual subscriptions, as most papers did and continue to do, USA Today banked on business travelers and vacationers.

Despite critics' skepticism (often times well-founded), USA Today caught on, and it eventually attained the top circulation of any paper in the country.

As USA Today celebrates its 25th anniversary, the newspaper industry finds itself on the cusp of another major shakeup. Just this week, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — papers which, despite USA Today's success, remain the two most respected bastions of journalism in this country — issued announcements that give some indication to how consumers will receive the news 25 years from now.

Ending a two-year experiment, the New York Times pulled the plug Tuesday on Times Select, the newspaper's online paid-subscription service. Going forward, all of the Gray Lady's content including its opinion columnists and much of its archives will be available for free at NYTimes.com.

In its obituary for Times Select, the Times said the paid service had "met expectations," netting a total of 227,000 paying subscribers and garnering about $10 million per year in revenue for the paper. But subscriber growth was stagnant, and the Times felt it could increase ad revenue by granting free access to its entire website. The newspaper also alluded to the fact that the opinion writers found in the premium section did not enjoy their exposure being limited only to paying subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, appears on the verge of following the Times' lead. Though it has yet to make a final decision, new owner Rupert Murdoch indicated Tuesday he is leaning toward making all of the Journal's online content available for free.

While the Times' decision to end Times Select had been speculated for months, the Journal's potential move away from the paid-subscriber model comes as something of a surprise. Of all the newspapers that have tried to offer some of their content online at a premium, the Journal has been far and away the most successful. WSJ.com boasts nearly one million paying subscribers and brings in more than $50 million of annual revenue for Dow Jones, the paper's parent company.

It would seem that each newspaper has come to a simple realization here: In the information age, people won't pay for information. Or at least the number who will is small, so small that the Times and the Journal are willing to forego online subscriptions and stake their Internet futures — which is to say, as newspapers, their futures period — on an ability to attract sufficient online ad revenue.

The thinking goes, of course, that by opening up their websites to all, page visits will go up, and so will the money generated from ads.

Unfortunately, the long-term feasibility of relying solely on online ad revenue is questionable. While the growth rate for online ad revenue was a blistering 19.3 percent during the second quarter of this year, according to the Newspaper Association of America, it still accounts for less than 10 percent of most newspapers' total ad revenue. Worse, the growth rate has been leveling off. Portals like Google and Yahoo!, which post news wires from services like The Associated Press and Reuters, have siphoned off an increasing share of the news-viewing audience on the Internet.

And so newspapers are stuck with a predicament in the not too-distant future, in which print revenue continues to decrease but online revenue can't pick up the slack. Profitable enterprises today, newspapers will enter potentially long periods of unprofitability. If lucky, some newspapers will eventually be able to generate enough revenue through their websites to get back in the black.

In scrapping (or potentially scrapping) premium online services, the Times and the Journal are acknowledging, in large part, that tough times are ahead. They're recognizing there's only one source of long-term revenue they will be able to rely on — online ad revenue — and they might as well start figuring out how to exploit it as early as possible.

Here's hoping they're right.

Ryan Masse ([email protected]) is a first-year law student.