In business, all years are critical — make a big mistake and you won’t have the chance to make another one. But in the media, wave after wave of transformation mean the coming year is particularly important.

Insurgents are racing over the hills; margins, along with the advertising sales that drove them, are tumbling; and people consume media content at a time, place and, often, at a cost of their choosing. Forget New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking imperatives, a to-do list that requires eating your Wheaties and then some. So on the last day of 2012, it’s worth looking at a group of leaders who confront very steep hills to climb in the year that ends in lucky 13.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Laura Lang

LAURA LANG, C.E.O. OF TIME INC.

Hired a year ago from a digital advertising firm to head Time Inc., Time Warner’s magazine behemoth, Ms. Lang was optimistically viewed as an out-of-the-box answer to the knotty problem of making a print company dance in a digital era.

Twelve months later, the honeymoon, if there ever was one, is over. Advertising has quickly gone backward at the publisher, and the nascent efforts in mobile and video Ms. Lang has championed will not fill the crater anytime soon.

Time Inc., an industry leader in print subscriptions, has yet to find a way to wring money from consumers on the Web. Ms. Lang has been slow in articulating a business strategy and building a team to execute it, and at some point, the people who hired her will start checking their watches.

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

Jeffrey Zucker

JEFFREY ZUCKER, PRESIDENT OF CNN WORLDWIDE

Of all the people on this list, Mr. Zucker, whose appointment was announced in November, probably has the best chance of showing progress. After all, he will take over a business that makes $600 million, all while doing not much of anything right.

Fixing any one of CNN’s manifest problems — mornings that are not competitive, evening ratings that are deeply embarrassing and a late-night transplant inPiers Morgan who is being rejected by the viewing public — will make him look like a genius.

Most important, to me at least, is that CNN master the Big Story. The network, often useful on breaking international news, has fumbled on signature domestic events including the Newtown school shooting. Call me old-fashioned, but fewer breathless, informationless stand-ups from reporters and more actual reporting may be a good place to start.

Evan Agostini/Associated Press

Martha Stewart

MARTHA STEWART, FOUNDER, MARTHA STEWART LIVING OMNIMEDIA

A nice little franchise that overshot after going public, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia resembles a troubled aircraft that is madly switching pilots while chunks of the plane are flying off.

Big write-downs caused third-quarter losses to exceed total revenue; after all of five months, the chief executive said she would step down; and the company just cut two of its magazines, Whole Living and Everyday Food, as stand-alone products.

Add in the fact that the Hallmark Channel declined to renew the daily “Martha Stewart Show,” and you have a lot less media coming out of a company named Omnimedia. Most of the profits now come from merchandising, but even those are imperiled.

The company signed a deal with J. C. Penney to sell branded Martha Stewart products last year, which was a coup, except that Macy’s accused the company of already selling it those rights and promptly sued. The stock fell to $2.50 a share from over $4.50 at the start of the year. Clearly, it’s going to take more than a few well-placed floral arrangements to make this company look pretty again.

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Robert Thomson

ROBERT THOMSON, C.E.O. OF NEWS CORPORATION

A trusted Rupert Murdochlieutenant who took over as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal in 2008, Mr. Thomson overcame the skepticism of the staff with an acute eye for news. The result was a more general interest newspaper that was a hit with readers. And now that News Corporation has been split into two divisions, publishing and entertainment, Mr. Thomson will make the leap to the business side and become the chief executive of the publishing unit.

Running those assets without the support of Fox News and “Avatar” will be a challenge, which became clear this month when the company said in a filing that its publishing businesses lost $2.1 billion in the fiscal year that ended June 30. Those losses came largely from $2.8 billion in charges mostly related to closing News of the World in Britain in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

The remaining print assets — including newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Times of London, and HarperCollins, a book publisher — will be folded in with a number of fast-growing Australian pay-television assets, which should give the newly formed division some financial cushion.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/business/media/in-2013-engineering-a-reversal-of-fortune-for-media-leaders.html?partner=rss&emc=rss