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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.

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.

That’s the dream that the MediaNews’ new made-for-the tablet, TapIn taps into. Potentially — and I cannot emphasize that word too much — it may become a prototypical product for the news industry, pointing a new way out of the hollowing-out landscape into which the news industry has meandered. TapIn, which launched today, is parent company MediaNews Group’s big play for the iPad, “a better version of Patch,” says MediaNews exec Steve Rossi.

They ran into these realities of the newspaper business:

1. You can have the best technology in the world, and it’ll be a slow sell to publishers.
2. The news industry is small, and getting smaller.
3. The revenue streams are smaller, and JO’s share of them is smaller.
4. Nothing — meaning no one thing — is going to “save journalism.” This is a long-term struggle, and the Press+ notion — a good test of the market in my view — is simply a piece of the puzzle. We’re all like kids with blocks, and we’ve got to endlessly figure out how to reconstruct the hollowed-out cities of journalism.

It’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge — see Test 5 below — against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it eschews conventional wisdom that $9.95 a month is a consumer limit on many digital items. The lack of an annual offer is glaring, and makes it far less friendly to expense accounts for business readers.

Yet it parallels the HuffPo buy in a major way: It’s an attempt by AOL to get bigger faster. Look at AOL’s financials and it’s clear Armstrong is in a race against time. As one savvy newspaper veteran pointed out to me last week, AOL looks, ironically, a lot like a newspaper company. It has a legacy circulation product, in slow, but unmistakeable decline — its AOL-brand Internet access service — and a digital ad business (in turnaround mode) that isn’t growing fast enough to turn the company sustainably profitable in the future. So The Huffington Post not only pasted the face of Arianna atop the site, in hopes her followers will follow, but acts as the wished-for rocket fuel for overall company traffic growth over the next couple of years, especially as the election season, with its political interest, dawns once again.

Patch is part of that strategy for audience growth, drawing into AOL customers through the local pipeline.

The Outside.in deal aims to do a simple thing to support that growth: create more page views around local content, at a lower cost to AOL. Or putting it even more simply: bulking up Patch, on the cheap.

What’s a solution to the mess? Well, there are any number of solutions. Here’s mine: Apple goes ahead and sells digital subscriptions in its store. On revenue shares, it takes 30 percent the first year, 20 percent the second year, 10 percent the third year, and 5 percent each subsequent year the sub is live. It further offers “add-on” products, like print subscriptions and even subscriptions to other non-Apple digital products, with those sales enabled through a publisher’s site; Apple gets a 5-percent revenue share for the first year on any of these add-ons. Apple shares with publishers the user data it already knows and the data to come, still being a major victor here because it alone sees the big picture of news behavior aggregated across all news apps. Apple incents publisher partners to gladly join in the iAds program, giving them preferential revenue shares in the program. Do all that — and everyone can advance.