The author and media writer Ken Auletta has some advice for companies trying to cope with the challenge of continual change: If he were in your shoes, he'd have an engineer alongside.

It's important to have lean-forward, not lean-back executives, he told a confererence this week. But it's also vital to have an engineer to bounce your ideas off.

Auletta believes we're in an era of "maybe models" involving uncertain financial underpinnings of journalism. As he sees it, paying for content is going to be essential in the time ahead. Advertisers are shunning low-quality sites, he asserts.