National Geographic
A "Happy July 1st" and a "Happy July 4th" to all of you. We should celebrate such occasions while we can since they soon may be cancelled and we soon may be gone.
It would be fitting if my first post in July was a celebratory one, but being contrarian I will instead chronicle another extinction, or near extinction. Although the National Geographic may be around for a bit longer, it is like Martha, the last passenger pigeon, likely to be soon extinct.
The last sightings are found in three recent articles which will be excerpted below since the passing of the National Geographic is worth noting. You will not be surprised that corporations played a role in this extinction and that the cast of characters includes Walt Disney and Rupert Murdoch.
1. "National Geographic Lays Off Its Last Remaining Staff Writers: The magazine, which remains among the most read in the U.S., has struggled in the digital era to command the kind of resources that fueled the deep reporting it became known for," Paul Farhi, Washington Post, June 28, 2023.
"Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem.
On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers.
The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department.
The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine’s editorial operations.
Departing staffers said Wednesday the magazine has curtailed photo contracts that enabled photographers to spend months in the field producing the publication’s iconic images.
In a further cost-cutting move, copies of the famous bright-yellow-bordered print publication will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year, the company said in an internal announcement last month....
The magazine’s current trajectory has been years in the making, set in motion primarily by the epochal decline of print and ascent of digital news and information. In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.
At its peak in the late 1980s, National Geographic reached 12 million subscribers in the United States, and millions more overseas. Many of its devotees so savored its illumination of other worlds — space, the depths of the ocean, little-seen parts of the planet — that they stacked old issues into piles that cluttered attics and basements.
It remains among the most widely read magazines in America, at a time when magazines are no longer widely read. At the end of 2022, it had just under 1.8 million subscribers, according to the authoritative Alliance for Audited Media.
National Geographic was launched by Washington’s National Geographic Society, a foundation formed by 33 academics, scientists and would-be adventurers, including Alexander Graham Bell. The magazine was initially sold to the public as a perk for joining the society. It grew into a stand-alone publication slowly but steadily, reaching 1 million subscribers by the 1930s....
The magazine’s place of honor continued to dim through a series of corporate reshufflings that began in 2015 when the Society agreed to form a for-profit partnership with 21st Century Fox, which took majority control in exchange for $725 million. The partnership came under the Disney banner in 2019 as part of a massive $71 billion deal between Fox and Disney."
Those of you who thought that the "television versions" were sometimes inferior to the print ones are correct:
"The magazine was eventually surpassed for profits and attention by the society’s video operations, including its flagship National Geographic cable channel and Nat Geo Wild, a channel focused on animals. While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision."
I do confess that both my wife and I enjoyed, "Restaurants at the End of the World," which were found in very remote areas. The program aired on the National Geographic channel.
Comments:
Many Post readers commented about the article. Here are a few samples:
The National Geographic went from a board of directors comprised of World renowned Scientists, Explorers, Educators, Photographers and Adventurers to a Corporate Board beholden only to the raw banality of bottom line Capitalism.
Thank you for this post. I will be cancelling my Nat Geo subscription. The writing has been declining (probably because they don’t have enough staff writers). Disney’s desire to create a low quality product as a profit engine is one I will not support with my money. I stand in solidarity with the writers. Disney won’t get another penny out of me.
When Rupert Murdoch bought it, I cancelled my subscription.
2. "National Geographic Lays Off More Writers: The company did not specify how many were shed and said that the magazine, known for its focus on discovery and exploration, would continue to be published on a monthly basis," Jesus Jimenez, New York Times, June 29, 2023.
"National Geographic, the science and nature magazine that for more than a century has sent its writers and photographers to explore and document some of the most remote corners of the Earth, shed more writers and other staff members this week in a round of layoffs that had been announced in April...."
The magazine is still well-read at a time when other magazines have lost subscribers or folded their print publications entirely. Through the end of last year, the magazine had more than 1.7 million subscribers, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, which audits publications."
3. "The Virtual End of National Geographic Magazine”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, June 29, 2023.
"On the menu today: This is going to sound like an extended version of an appeal to support our webathon, but the news that the illustrious magazine National Geographic has laid off all of its last remaining staff writers is a demonstration that we, as a society, have largely chosen to stop paying for news or entertainment, with far-reaching consequences for our lives. The belief that we’re entitled to high-quality information in almost every form — and will accept lower-quality stuff if it is free — is one big reason that the current state of American discourse looks and sounds like a WWE match among insane-asylum inmates held in a sewer.
What Happens When We Stop Paying for Quality?....
The rest of the article is worth reading and paying for.
Unlike passenger pigeons, old issues of the National Geographic can still be found. The October 1912 issue pictured above can be purchased at Attic Books here in London, Ontario for $25.00
For now, at least, old issues can also be found for free in libraries. Western University has, for now, at least, many print volumes in storage and some on microfilm.
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