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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.

Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

“The metered model is simply a tactic,” says Gary Farrugia, publisher of The Day. “The database is the strategy.” That database was built by Daniel Williams, whom Farrugia hired a year ago from the New York Times Regional News Group, and it’s indeed the next step in the evolution of print-based, throw-it-on-the-driveway local newspaper company.

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.

In this evolution, the iPad is so far our human pinnacle, though it will be followed by wonders to come. It also marks a signal change in digital usage, and especially in digital news consumption. I think of it as the likely missing link in the digital news evolution. It’s a link that, out of the blue — or maybe out of the darkness — has offered news companies, old and new, the unlikely (last?) chance to get a new sustainable business model.

Ah, but what kind of new face will AOL/HuffPost’s be? It could be, simply, the anti-Murdoch. Sure, The Daily is “centrist,” whatever that means in the world of 2011, but the right-leaning proclivities of Murdoch Media are clear. MSNBC has tiptoed into position, leaning forward gingerly, but then wrapping itself in knots over small campaign contributions. Arianna could simply embrace the left end of that spectrum, porting over her passion and partisanship, the very elements that have defined her Post, the fastest growing news site on the web. In fact, if she doesn’t bring along what got her to where she is, then what exactly is AOL buying and where will her core audience go?

A few companies are now laying new strategy, based on private projections. They are forecasting that 20-25 percent of their print readers will migrate to the tablet within five years. (Remember, at the forecast rates, one in five Americans would have a tablet by 2014.) All admit that it’s guesswork at this point. Yet we see in their early reader pricing the acknowledgment that the real print-to-digital transition might be finally be upon us — and they don’t want to miss this ship when it sails, as they have too many others.

Conventional Wisdom #1) Readers won’t pay for non-business content. Yes, we know that readers will pay for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and that Consumer Reports, which helps us save money, counts more digital subs than anyone else. While some smaller dailies have begun to poke around the edges of digital reader content, Exhibit A will be the New York Times, with its new metered payment system to launch early in the year. If the Times can claim one to two percent of 30 million or so uniques (its internal count) — or 300,000 to 600,000 paying customers — that’ll be a major milestone.

That 92-percent “open” market — maybe 23 million businesses — tells us how early we are in this digital marketing movement. Commerce change is one thing. For those who care about the news, the big thing to watch is whether those dollars, as they move digitally, move to companies that produce news, distribute news — or have nothing to do with news.