The news business is changing fast — again. That’s because the ad business is changing fast — again. Or is it because Facebook is changing the ad business, or because Twitter and Linkedin are changing the news business. Day by day, the big social sites look and act more like media companies, delivering all manner of content and advertising. Next up: with a combined audience of 1 billion, what role will Yahoo, a portal, and Tumblr, a social blogging network, play in this media puzzle?

One thing is clear: news organizations and their journalists must jump into this free-for-all — or be hopelessly left behind. As someone who builds news experiences, I’m focused on people and products. Nearly 35% of our editorial and product team has joined us over the past three years, all with skills that never existed here before. What talent do we need now? Two years ago we launched a new kind of article page for a new kind of content model — and watched our audience surge to 48 million unique monthly users from 18 million (as measured by Omniture). How must that page and model evolve in the months ahead so we can keep pace?

Here are 9 key factors we’re constantly talking about as we adjust our product plans for the next six months:

1) Networks: Not those dying, one-way broadcast and cable news models. I am talking people networks offering an immersive social experience that generate a huge number of money-making page views. Facebook accounts for more than a trillion of them a month, or at least 25% of Internet traffic. With that kind of usage, who needs pay walls, the newspaper industry’s latest Hail Mary. The rise of programmatic buying of ad inventory, a scary challenge for any traditional media company, plays to the strength of Facebook’s scale, whether its desktop or mobile. Just as threatening, who needs editors when friends produce more relevant, if not more trustworthy, news digests. Social networks do need to keep consumer fickleness in mind. After the Yahoo-Tumblr news broke, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s founder, said 72,000 Tumblr users an hour were switching to his platform, up from the typical 400. Last week, Yahoo began to populate Tumblr with ads, setting off another round of hoots and howls.