Aeroelastic flutter can lead to large amplitude oscillations of tensioned wide webs and narrow ribbons commonly used in the paper-handling, textile, sheet-metal, and plastics industries. In this article, we examine the aeroelastic stability of a web or a ribbon, which is submerged in an incompressible and inviscid fluid flow across its free edges. The web or ribbon is modeled as a uniaxially tensioned Kirchhoff plate with vanishingly small bending stiffness. A Galerkin discretization for the structural dynamics together with panel methods for the unsteady three dimensional potential flow are used to cast the coupled system into the form of a gyroscopic, nonconservative dynamical system. It is found that wide webs mainly destabilize through a divergence instability due to the cross-flow-induced conservative centrifugal effects. However, for certain values of applied tension, the wake-induced nonconservative effects can destabilize the web via a weak flutter instability. Contrarily, narrow ribbons in cross flow are nearly equally likely to undergo flutter or divergence instability depending on the value of applied tension.