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National Geographic Lays Off All Remaining Staff Writers (washingtonpost.com) 133

"The Washington Post reports that all remaining editorial staffers have been laid off at National Geographic, as the iconic magazine continues to spiral downward," writes longtime Slashdot reader DesScorp. "The famous yellow-bordered print issues of our youth is also an endangered species, as National Geographic also announced that print issues will no longer be sold on newsstands." From the report: 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.

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National Geographic Lays Off All Remaining Staff Writers

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  • I used to love nat geo but once I got that issue with a little boy being encouraged to believe the lie that he can be a girl i unsubbed immediatly. a shame because i used to love natgeo when it focused on nature
    • If you think they went "woke" - for whatever you think that means - I'm surprised you didn't get mad when they accepted that the evidence of climate change is overwhelming. They've been calling out pollution and global warming for decades now.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Wok?

      I love woks. The local restaurant has one the size of a satellite dish and they make a damn tasty lunch.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:29AM (#63643090)

      lol this is all conservatives can even think about anymore.

      economy? nah
      taxes? nope
      foreign policy? who cares
      the american family? if it doesnt involve me thinking about a kids genitals i dont want to hear about it!

      • Not conservatives (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Evidence-based people have trouble with the whole bullshit trans concept. It's gender dysphoria. It's a psychological condition.

        Keep deluding yourselves into extinction, though.

      • Regardless of what you think of the validity of OP's comment, it's not surprising (to me) that the so-called "woke" thing takes precedence for conservatives over issues such as economy/taxation/foreignpolicy. If you boil down what conservatives describe as "woke", you get to fundamental views on sex/biology and freedom of speech. And again, whatever your views on these topics are, you can easily argue that they're the building blocks on which the rest of the culture and views on more complex topics are deri
        • Oh and I used to love picking up a NatGeo for a flight. Haven't done as much recently for no specific reason tho.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by whoever57 ( 658626 )

          Regardless of what you think of the validity of OP's comment, it's not surprising (to me) that the so-called "woke" thing takes precedence for conservatives over issues such as economy/taxation/foreignpolicy

          The whole point of "woke" for "conservatives" is that it is something that is poorly defined that they can hate on. You don't have to agree with your fellow conservative on specifics if you can agree to hate "woke" policies, without defining what those policies really are in detail.

          • Yup. It's one of those rallying cries. A bit like "greedflation" on the other end. But the political cycle and the media coverage of politics is such that there is no time for nuance.
          • The funny thing is that it's not actually that poorly defined when push comes to shove. When Ron DeSantis' trial judge demanded they define the term, his lawyer said "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them". Which I think is pretty close to a definition liberals would use (they'd probably say "awareness" instead of "belief").

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Though it is true that "woke" is not precisely defined, I don't think that this lack of definition is its whole point.

            It has a vague definition that is sufficient for conservative purposes. Anything that involves artificially elevating minority races above majority races (whites, specifically), or that involves artificially elevating alternative sexualities/lifestyles (trans, gay, etc.,) above straights, is woke. Same goes for the artificial elevation of females above males. Lastly, good old-fashioned se

      • Well here's a poll from April of this year asking what republicans care about.

        https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyl... [yahoo.com]

        1) challenges "woke"
        2) hands off muh guns!
        3) say Trump won in 2020
        4) make liberals angry

        I'm going to guess Hunter's laptop and Hillary's emails are numbers 5 and 6.

    • Wok? Your poor English has betrayed you identity as a Chinese propagandist.

    • Woke means that page 3 is gone

      National Geographic and the swimsuit issue was the only outlet for repressed Christian boys. Going to the barn or bathroom to get relief.

      I think they realize that now that Biden is giving free internet p0rn to every kid in America they have no purpose.

    • I appreciate when someone brings up wokeness or the culture wars. Makes it easy to know who to ignore.

      Now, this being modded insightful, that’s the real crime!

    • Huh?

      National Geographic was woke for at least 50 years. It's a defining characteristic of the magazine.

      You realize that woke's core nature is to treat everyone with dignity and respect? It's also about thinking about our futures and what we hope to leave behind.

      You're issue is probably with its execution by people who are generally ignorant or others capitalizing on it.

      Many people have the right overall intentions but can't seem to express it more gracefully than to swing hammers around in a glass shop. And
  • NatGeo is my favorite magazine to read when flying; I pick it up at the airport. I've been flying more in the past couple years, so my reading frequency has picked up on this one. Sad to see it go.

    That said, they've had a lot of "special issues" lately on the newsstands. The most recent one I've seen is something about prominent figures from the bible. It looks like a regular NatGeo magazine, and in some cases is more prominently displayed as well. I'm not sure they're doing themselves many favors
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When I was a kid, my parents forced me to take piano lessons for a few years. My piano teacher was a 96-year-old woman (who ended up living to 108). She had *every* Natgeo magazine ever printed on bookshelves in her house. When she passed away, her ~75 year old son inherited everything. I checked in a few years ago, and they still were subscribed. It was sorta like an episode of "hoarders", but instead of trash everywhere, there were bookshelves everywhere. There were even bookshelves in front of book
      • I used to pick up bags of National Geographic magazines at my local library at the dollar bag sales.
        My local library was rather large and still didn't keep all the old issues.
        They were also the most popular magazines in my grade school to cut up for art collages.
        I still have a box of maps from my childhood that I saved from them in a box in my house.

        Wonderful magazine. Would make a great addition to any doctor or dentist office if everyone wasn't just using their phones instead.
        Sad to see them go but likel

        • Wonderful magazine. Would make a great addition to any doctor or dentist office if everyone wasn't just using their phones instead. Sad to see them go but likely not viable in their current form anymore than the sears catalog is.

          Well, I read this in the synopsis:

          The cutback -- the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. --

          It appears these days...anything "The Mouse" touches dies these days...movie franchises...magazines, you name it....

      • Think the Internet Archive maybe would like to take the collection seeing it is so complete.
    • As in plastic ones. Toys. For children.

      Clearly, Disney is in a very poor financial situation and all humans have to go.
      Enjoy the ever further infantilization of CultureTM!

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:19AM (#63643052)

    They had a choice to either reinforce their core markets and build on them or sell out to Fox. They chose to sell out to Fox, a company that is not known for good brand management for stuff like NatGeo.

    Then Fox got bought out by Disney, and it was inevitable that they would swirl the drain.

    From what I hear, Marvel Comics (NOT to be confused with Marvel Studios) is starting to slowly swirl the drain because of Disney mismanagement that has lead to gutting the core product's quality and insulting its traditional fan base.

    The moral of this story is that companies that need to grow by buying content producers very often cannot produce quality content themselves. We're even seeing this with video games now where Microsoft is having to buy out ever publisher and studio it can get its hands on because they have such a low ability as a company to organically create new creative teams capable of building quality products.

    • by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:54AM (#63643188)

      If these companies would have stayed independent, they'd have had a chance to sink or swim on their own.

      Now they'll end up as "IP" for some faceless corporation buried behind walls of copyright and trademark for a century.

      My personal favorite in this category is Avalon Hill, which used to make wargames before Hasbro inserted them in their IP locker.

      • I owned Tactics 2 when I was a kid, but hadn't thought about Avalon Hill in a long time. Your post prompted me to look at their product line now and you are right they gutted that company. I don't see any of their games, just rebranded Hasbro shit. So sad, things really were way better before about 2005.

      • Try gaming company Slitherine. They filled that gap. Paradox is another. Smaller game companies fill the void although I am sure the cycle will eventually gobble them up. The Operation Art of War IV has got to be one of the best hex based military simulators out there ever.
        • by HBI ( 10338492 )

          Will give it a try, i'm a sucker for those kind of games. (a game whose name is blocked by the lameness filter, initials TR) being the archetype of such games, a great simulation done heuristically via playtesting.

    • Naw, the problem is that magazines as a whole are dying out. Especially one that relies upon regular subscriptions over supermarket checkout line impulse buys. Doesn't help that they were more intellectual and scientific compared to the gossip rags that sell best.

      I hope the National Geographic _Society_ continues on even if the glossy magazine does not. (second president was Alexander Graham Bell)

    • I don't think its that they can't produce quality content. I think its hard, expensive, and risky to produce quality content. Its a lot more economical to let dozens/hundreds of other people take the risk to create new things, and then buy the IP from the ones who succeed.

      Even highly talented musicians who have hit records often can't reproduce successful results. There is more to quality content than talent, effort, or money.

    • From what I hear, Marvel Comics (NOT to be confused with Marvel Studios) is starting to slowly swirl the drain because of Disney mismanagement that has lead to gutting the core product's quality and insulting its traditional fan base.

      What is the "traditional fan base," though?

      I'm GenX - When I was a kid in the 70s and a teen in the 80s I bought Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Avengers etc. off a rack at the local drug store. The comics were printed on newsprint and had (gasp!!!) ads. Today, if my 12-year-ol

  • by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:31AM (#63643104)

    Real, complex stories, high quality printed magazines, actual on-site research, professional photography and videography, expensive travel, competent writers, a skew towards an independent truth... The world generally no longer values any of that.

    My father was a subscriber for all of my life - 52 years. Those magazines were ever-present in our home, even when we lived on next to nothing in a trailer court outside of town, with my father cutting hair and my mother sorting mail.

    They've been doomed for a while. I'm sorry to see them go, though. I cannot begin to count how many issues I read.

    • It is sad. National Geographic and Scientific American were always on the coffee table at our house when I was growing up. My grandmother also used to buy National Geographic's books, and I remember just pouring over one of their books on the Aztecs when I was nine or ten, with its stunning pictures and artistic renditions of their temples and cities. It really was an amazing publishing house, and one that at one time was one of the great geographical publications, where you could have a magazine that had a

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      They had a lot of space articles also. I used to peruse them in the library. It's where I first read about the crazy struggles of the Ranger moon probes in the 1960's. They kept failing one after the other. One manager noticed cigarette ashes in the parts, and that's when clean-room procedures became common-place.

    • by sinij ( 911942 )

      Real, complex stories, high quality printed magazines, actual on-site research, professional photography and videography, expensive travel, competent writers, a skew towards an independent truth... The world generally no longer values any of that.

      The general population never valued any of that, but it was fashionable to pretend that one does, because intellectualism was fashionable. Now, times have changed and it is fashionable to pretend to be an activist.

    • by sc0t ( 10132216 )
      I can close my eyes, hear the National Geographic television theme song in my head and see the famous yellow rectangle flying into the opening credits in my minds' eye. I had the same experience you did. The print magazines came to the house every month in their little brown paper sleeves, and I absorbed every one of them, for decades. This news feels like learning about the death of an old friend. What a gut punch. I'm almost equally troubled thinking about how little people value quality long form jou
    • It was always kind of pseudo-intelligent.

      That puff piece on the Shah of Iran in the mid 1970s didn't age well at all. Nor did Jane Goodall's noble chimpanzees.

      Nobody wants those back issues. Nobody. Pure landfill.
  • by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:01AM (#63643218)

    Its not just NatGeo, soon there won't be any magazines. *

    Amazon is closing its Newsstand service by September

    * apart from those containing 30 to 35 rounds of 5.56x45mm or 5.45x39mm or 7.62x39mm or 9x19mm etc

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      You are forgetting 7.62x51 and 6.8x51.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Are there any good magazines left? The only ones I read now are Japanese ones, because they have really good articles that teach you high level stuff. All the English language ones I see are mostly just beginner tutorials. How to use cat in Linux, type these commands to make your module work.

  • Newsstands (Score:4, Insightful)

    by doconnor ( 134648 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:06AM (#63643234) Homepage

    I remember for most of its history National Geographic wasn't available on Newsstands. It was originally only delivered to members of the National Geographic Society.

    • That's how I got mine when I was a kid, I became a member of the National Geographic Society. Two issues that i remember standing out are the Chernobyl issue and the issue with the Afghani girl with the eyes*.

      *If you saw the cover you know who I'm talking about.

      • That's how I got mine when I was a kid, I became a member of the National Geographic Society. Two issues that i remember standing out are the Chernobyl issue and the issue with the Afghani girl with the eyes*.

        *If you saw the cover you know who I'm talking about.

        Same here, and I recall the Afghani girl cover.

        She was later rediscovered, in case you are interested.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        I just looked her up myself again, looks like she got evacuated to Italy in 2021.

    • by G00F ( 241765 )

      think libraries and what not had them, but yes, as a kid we had them, and for a while kept many of them in special binders too...

  • by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:13AM (#63643250) Journal

    You can blame the preference for electronic media and other factors; but NG was dead to me a long time ago in the early 2000s. My father used to give me a subscription for my birthday, and when it was coming up I told him not to do that. He said he'd noticed me picking them up and putting them down quickly. That's because it had become a picture book.

    Oh noes! How dare you impugn the aware winning NG photographers.

    Well, it's not so much that I'm blaming them. They were just doing their job. It's the editors who decided that was *all* the magazine really needed, who made the prose a throw-in just to flesh things out and caption the pictures.

    I used to spend hours soaking in their writer's tales of paddling through the Amazon or treking across distant mountain ranges. The text was still there, but it was suffering. The pictures were magnificent, but you just look a few seconds and turn, then you're done. It doesn't feel like it's worth it.

    So it's just like LIFE magazine, which I seem to recall also becoming a larger format to make the photography pop, and having special issues, then less and less frequently, then stopping.

    It's not just the electronic age killing it. You can't just sell pictures. People can see everything you've got in a minute. If the news stand let's you pick it up, you've basically "read" it without buying. You need compelling prose to prevent that, to make it feel like a worthwhile purchase.

    Case in point. The New Yorker [wikipedia.org] is still going strong. The cartoons are a side-show, not the whole magazine. If you get pulled in to a long story, it can take an hour.

    • I.e. If you can point out such a basic flaw, shouldn't they be able?
      And shouldn't the pivot be towards better writing instead of outsourcing it to lowest bidder? It's not like they are lacking money or anything.
      Nah, this is all on Disney.

      • I tend to blame the metrics. It's not that they are too dumb to spot the flaw themselves, it's that the thing they measure or the way they measure it says that the change was a successful one, so they do more of it. It's an argument I get into frequently with advertising, especially google ads related companies. They'll show us all the charts and the ROI and how spending 3x on ads has returned a 10x on the metrics. And it's really hard to argue with... until I bring out the actual sales charts and point out

    • My dad got the box set DVD collection. He also had alot of books when he was subscribed to it.

      I think 100 years anniversary box set or something? Been a while.

  • by TheStatsMan ( 1763322 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:17AM (#63643264)

    Nat Geo was a super interesting magazine, but it can't compete with endless online content. The world is simply smaller. The mystique of the international world is not hidden behind the thousands of miles that it once was.

    It's not because people don't find value in this type of content, a magazine was never going to compete in today's world.

    • I remember trying to explain what the internet was to friends in the publishing industry and what it meant for them about 20-25 years ago. Oh how they laughed and laughed.

  • So many iconic pictures that changed our perception of the world and how we view ourselves graced this publication. It's failure is just another tale of capitalism - movies about Thor's love life (god, I wish i could unsee that movie) are more important and thus deemed to have more value than document real world emotion, triumph and tragedy. It's not what we want, but it's what we deserve.
    • His hammer [wikipedia.org] always WAS his penis.

      • As I was saying before some closeted snowflake with a hardon for big burly men tried to downmod reality...

        Thor's hammer ALWAYS [wikipedia.org] was his penis.
        Duh! He's a fertility deity boys and girls.

        That's why he gets all upset when he thinks he's unworthy or various women take control of it or break it into pieces.
        Draw your own conclusions about Captain America handling his "hammer" and Thor being all giddy about it. [youtu.be]

  • by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:59AM (#63643448)
    My grandfather had every issue since before the turn of the last century. I grew up reading them, they were a treasure.

    When he died, I told everyone they're valuable and should be kept and I wanted them.

    But they were thrown out because nobody could be bothered.
  • Wouldn't it be more humane to just honorably end it than to junkify it so it dies a slow ugly death?
  • No wonder it's being trashed. National Geographic doesn't lend itself well to MCU plots. RIP. It was fun while it lasted.
  • by Walt Dismal ( 534799 ) on Thursday June 29, 2023 @01:41PM (#63644052)
    Disney ownership, slow slide to the toilet.
  • by kenwd0elq ( 985465 ) <kenwd0elq@engineer.com> on Thursday June 29, 2023 @02:39PM (#63644262)

    I cancelled by subscription to National Geographic right after the first big glowbull warmening article; it was blatantly false scare tactics, and a clear sign that accuracy was no longer valued. I cancelled my subscription to Scientific American the next year, for the same reason.

    And now this. First Disnefication, and then no writers. Wokism destroys everything.

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      fuckin hell you people are dipshits

      you'll be standing on the roof of your home while it's flooded and on fire and you'll be smugly telling those woke rescue workers to get lost because they're just trying to scare you into leaving

  • Wait, Newsstands are still a thing?

  • We’ll just let ChatGPT write our articles for us.

  • In the 1987 sci-fi novel "Legacy of Heorot", National Geographic was financing interstellar expeditions. And in "2001: A Space Odyssey" Pan Am was flying to space stations.

    It's always risky using real companies in stories set in the future.

  • Scientific American should also crash and burn. They are nothing more than a propaganda outlet that pushes bizarre anti-reality gender ideology and racial grievance. Their editor in chief is a wack-a-loon.

"The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust." -- Lawrence Dalzell

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