When Bruce Rhodes "walked in" 2½ years ago to run the publication MIT Technology Review, the new VP of consumer revenues and marketing had a six-times-a-year, "old" magazine, a free website and the word revenue in his title. Things had to change.

“This is the best time to be in media,” Dietmar Schantin told me last month. “You can’t succeed anymore with [a] vanilla [approach]. Good, relevant content will always succeed. Every journalist should be happy about this; now it is about being new and creative.”