There is a moment in every disruption when the affected industry mistakes a commercial problem for a political one. The music business spent a decade litigating Napster and its successors before anyone seriously assessed the underlying issues. Publishers are at a similar moment now and the response is following a familiar pattern.
 
Last week some of the UK’s largest media companies, including the BBC, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky News and The Telegraph launched Spur – the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition – inviting global media leaders to join what has already been nicknamed “Nato for news”. The ambition is to establish shared licensing frameworks to ensure that AI companies pay fairly for journalistic content and respect intellectual property.

Separately, Condé Nast’s chief executive, Roger Lynch, told the FT that AI summaries have delivered “another death blow” to Google search, predicting that within a couple of years, search traffic will no longer be a meaningful driver of his business. Both stories are true. Neither addresses the actual problem. Condé Nast has already signed a licensing deal with OpenAI. Lynch’s comments suggest that he knows that it buys time but doesn’t guarantee survival.
 
This candour is useful precisely because it reveals what went unexamined for so long. If Vogue and Vanity Fair were primarily dependent on Google to deliver readers, the issue was never Google. Publishers who built on search were renting an audience, not owning one. The traffic looked like loyalty but this was an illusion. AI summaries just exposed it.
 
Spur, meanwhile, is a reasonable initiative dressed in language that inadvertently concedes the argument. By framing the crisis as a licensing dispute, publishers position themselves as content suppliers to AI companies rather than as institutions with independent authority. The danger isn’t only that AI doesn’t pay for the content. It’s also that publishers who license their archives are implicitly accepting a model in which AI holds the reader relationship and journalism sits somewhere upstream, wholesaling raw material. 
 
The publications that look least alarmed right now made a different set of decisions, mostly a decade ago. The FT spent years acquiring readers who pay, not visitors who arrive from algorithms and leave. Bloomberg built a terminal, a data business and an editorial identity so embedded in professional life that no summary replaces it. Successful publishers share specificity over scale and depth over reach – a willingness to be genuinely selective about their audience. None tried to be everything to everyone, delivered by Google. That instinct, which seemed conservative or even eccentric during the growth years of digital media, turns out to have been the only viable strategy. These are brands that, by accident or design, had already exited the attention economy before it collapsed.
 
AI disruption has not created a new problem for publishing. It has clarified an old one. The publications that survive will not be those that most successfully lobby for a fairer share of the attention economy, though fairer terms would be nice. They will be those that built something that readers chose to return to because it is irreplaceable, not gaming page views or letting audience engagement call the shots. 
 
Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based journalist and Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Some five months ago I joined the procession of fashion-week goers dressed in all-black tuxedos to attend the final show designed by Giorgio Armani, held in the courtyard of Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera (writes Natalie Theodosi). For a brief moment the industry paused to celebrate the life of the Italian maestro, as he was often referred to among his peers, forever admired for the clarity of his vision and, equally, for his unheard-of ability to operate independently during a time of consolidation and conglomerate takeovers.

As is always the case with fashion – forever on the hunt for what’s next – the narrative has quickly moved on to succession. Ever controlling, Mr Armani left his heirs precise instructions for his company’s future. During the most recent edition of Milan Fashion Week, where the Giorgio Armani brand hosted its presentation last Sunday morning, conversations swirled around the topic of succession – everyone wants to know how much closer the company is to an actual deal, since the terms of the will (which surprised all those unfamiliar with Armani’s ways) were announced. At the same time the company’s wheels keep spinning and there’s no denying the Armani brand’s prominence across the fashion market. 

Continue reading our fashion director’s piece on Armani here.