Bolting the doors won’t feed the garrison: 10 ways to save your publishing empire

David Buttle's new report, From Search Risk to Agentic Risk, is the clearest map yet of how AI is drawing value away from publishers. It shows where the walls are weakest. This is the companion piece about the food: how publishers earn once the doors are bolted.

At a recent private gathering in New York, the chief executives of ten of the largest publishing groups sat in one room. According to a senior executive who was there, only two of them expected their businesses to survive the next two years. They described journalism cloned within hours and passed around WhatsApp groups, and paywalls that leak faster than they can be patched.

That is the mood, and the instinctive response is to fortify: tighter paywalls, harder bot blocking, more lawyers, better locks. Some of that is necessary. But a siege is not decided by the quality of the door. It is decided by whether the stores last, and a publisher that spends the next three years reinforcing the gate while revenue drains away behind it will have defended a building it can no longer afford to heat.