In the early and promising years of the Internet’s infancy, European Organization for Nuclear Research produced order from chaos. In this order there were protocols, harbingers of the sort of inclusive communication that has made the modern Internet the earth-flattening and democratizing force that it currently is. Obtaining a seamless transfer of information was paramount and scientists were driven by visions of a day when the walls and intervals between their labs and offices were rendered insignificant. It was the Tower of Babel in reverse: smart people speaking a single language and working towards a common goal.

And for a while, things were good. The Internet became a polestar of commerce and communication, discourse and culture. Everyone clamored for milk crates, as small and populous as they were — and they got them. The world headed for a bright and egalitarian future. Things began to dim, however, when the promises of the Internet met the realities of the economy. Everyone, some more slowly than others, began to realize one thing most strongly: in the most pecuniary sense of the word, the Internet has its costs.

For the newspaper and magazine industry in particular, the costs of the Internet have come swiftly. Dogged by plummeting readership and a slightly more dire crash in advertising revenue, newspapers and magazines, one by one, realized the inefficacy of competing with free alternatives. Readers were flocking to the Internet, not print. Newspapers felt it, as did the dozens of magazines that have folded in recent years. The tried-and-true methods that had made the newspaper industry so profitable in the 20th century were being rapidly decimated in the 21st. Craigslist destroyed the profitability of personal advertisements. Blogs stole away readers. For newspapers and magazines, the future lay at the end of two divergent paths: assimilation or obliteration.

So they assimilated. Most publications did the then-sensical thing and dumped all of their print content online for free, banking on advertising revenue to recoup the unavoidable decrease in the number of online subscriptions. This plan, however, met its painful end as advertising revenue began to drop to unsustainable levels. Free, it seemed, had its limits.

And, thus, in an effort to protect the profitability of their products, the major newspaper companies veered in the opposite direction. Walls were built. Where there was “free,” there was now “pay.” As recently as last week, The New York Times announced that, starting in 2011, it would be placing its content behind a pay wall. Vague on the details, the plan consists of a limitation on the number of articles visitors to The Times website can view for free. This number, as of the writing of this article, is said to be somewhere between one and “a certain number” — though some estimations place it at roughly 20 to 30 articles per month. The focus, then, was on the most committed visitors, the heavy readers — not the casual perusers.

It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that the newspaper’s decision will have ripple effects access the whole industry. When consumers pay for newspaper content, we are paying for more than just news and commentary. There is a certain level of trust invested in what large established papers like The Times provide. Journalists are held to a higher standard of quality, and people tend to listen to what commentators like Frank Rich and Paul Krugman say. This is a large part of the reason why the average blog is something we would be particularly uncomfortable paying for. It’s larger than a matter of quality. Journalists provide a scarce product — expertise — and every consumer willing to pay for The Times each day recognizes, on some level, that very thing.

That is not to say that the blogosphere offers a negligible influence on large dailies like The Times. Instead, as we have seen time and time again, there is a strange sort of symbiosis between bloggers and professional journalists — the very relationship that is certain to be negatively affected by a pay wall. A common argument held by bloggers and Internet-savvy types is that placing content behind a pay wall contributes to a kind of information isolationism, a state that disrupts the free discourse that so many bloggers have become accustomed to. Many bloggers, for instance, foresee a precipitous drop in the number of links to The Times articles from Twitter and Facebook users.

But let’s assume that doesn’t happen. As awful as a lot of the decisions made by The Times have been over the years (remember Times Select?) it would be wise of us to give The Times the benefit of the doubt and assume they are cognizant of their important role on the Internet. The last thing any newspaper would want to do is cannibalize their readership; though, at the moment that is exactly what The Times seems intent on doing.

There are a few conclusions we can come to here. One: The Times is, on the whole, clueless about where to take their business model in this new decade. Two: even if they do succeed in adapting to the realities of the 21st century, it is unlikely that many others will be able to follow them, especially when the prospects of local newspapers seem dimmer and dimmer every day. Three: it is likely that things will get worse before they get better.

But a new ray of hope for the newspaper industry may just be on the horizion — and from Apple, of all companies. With a big press event planned for Jan. 27, rumor has it that Apple plans on unveiling a new tablet computer, one that aims to bridge the gap between print and digital and, in the process, rescue a whole industry. Sources say Steve Jobs has called it the most important thing he has ever done. And that may just be true.