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The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in the obit. AP faces a similar tension as it seeks a successor for long-time CEO Tom Curley. Dow Jones, cushioned by parent News Corp.’s better-lined pockets, too, is finalizing its CEO search. Put them together, and it’s a signal moment for American news media, as three top positions open themselves up to possibility, and imagination, simultaneously.

Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011:

Google: 54 percent
Apple: 54 percent
Facebook: 38 percent
Amazon: 46 percent

Today, in 2012, those questions are more pressing in our age of news deluge. We’re confronted at every turn, at every finger gesture, with more to read or view or listen to. It’s not just the web: It’s also the smartphone and especially the tablet, birthing new aggregator products — Google Currents and Yahoo Livestand have joined Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, and AOL Editions — every month. Compare for a moment the “top stories” you get on each side-by-side, and you’ll be amazed. How did they get there? Why are they so different?

Was it some checkbox I checked (or didn’t?!) at sign-in? Using Facebook to sign in seemed so easy, but how is that affecting what I get? Are all those Twitterees I followed determining my story selection? (Or maybe that’s why I’m getting so many Chinese and German stories?) Did I tell the Times to give the sports section such low priority? The questions are endless, a ball of twine we’ve spun in declaring some preferences in our profiles over the years, wound ever wider by the intended or (or un-) social curation of Facebook and Twitter, and multiplied by the unseen but all-knowing algorithms that think they know what we really want to read, more than we do. (What if they are right? Hold that thought.)

Today’s news that the Times Company is finally selling its New York Times Regional Newspaper Group holdings of 14 newspapers absolutely fits with the last week’s news of CEO Janet Robinson’s abrupt departure. Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world. The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company,

There’s an irony to such publisher partnerships, of course. On the one hand, Google is a “partner,” magnifying publisher businesses through its ad and search products. On the other, initiatives such as Google Tomorrow are a potential dagger to newspapers’ jugular. That’s the way of the web world. For Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or Facebook, any new initiative it takes on has its own internal logic. Should another industry — say newspapers — be wounded in the process, it’s just collateral damage. Given the size of these digital behemoths, as they decimate legacy industries, you can almost hear them say, “Sorry, did I sideswipe you? I didn’t feel anything.”

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you.

Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers going to monetize their content and audiences, as those audiences move dramatically from newspaper, magazine and broadcast to the tablet? A Pew data point: “A majority, say the tablet takes the place of what they used to get from a print newspaper or magazine (59 percent) or as a substitute for television news (57 percent).” (See “The Newsonomics of the Missing Link,”) So let’s look at the Newsonomics of Livestand.

As leading-edge publishers move away from destination-only strategies, they seek to colonize other habitable web environments; Facebook now looks like the friendliest clime, allowing publishers to keep all the revenue from ads they are selling within their Facebook apps. In addition, Facebook is providing aggregated data on user engagement — active users, likes, comments, post views, and post feedback.

Consider emerging tablet news disruption. For 18 months, the tablet and smartphone news environment has been single-brand-oriented. Early top-drawer brand winners include: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the BBC, NPR, the Financial Times, and CNN. Three start-up news aggregators have popped up their heads. Zite, a product that has pushed the concept of “fair use” taut, has been scooped up by CNN. Flipboard, with a revamped publisher relations strategy in place, and backed by$60 million in venture capital, would like to be the tablet news aggregator, as would Pulse. We’ve wondered where the big guys are — those winners in the online web derby. We won’t have to wonder much longer. Google Propeller and Yahoo Livestand will soon join AOL Editions, as Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all up their various tablet aggregation plays, as well. 2011 may well be remembered as a short time of innocence in the tablet news landscape.

Overall, what a next recession would do is accelerate most the current trends. We’d see some impact in the fourth quarter, but most of it in 2012, as those budgets are now warily being planned. We’ll beginning asking the question — again — of which companies can survive and under whose leadership, and ownership. In the U.S., most vulnerable are Lee Enterprises, publisher of 49 mostly smaller-community dailies, and McClatchy, publisher of 30 dailies and the fifth-largest newspaper company in the U.S….At The New York Times, where some terra firma has started to appear below the sold-off Times building, future cash flow has got to be a big concern. It’s well and good to have recently paid off Carlos Slim’s near-usurious loan early, but how thick is that cushion now? (And guess which Times-hating magnate is sitting across town with $12 billion-plus in cash and equivalents, only about to be a little drawn down by investor clamoring?)

What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming, our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.