After 151 Years, Popular Science Will No Longer Offer a Magazine (theverge.com) 40
After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. "Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to 'evolve' beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021," reports The Verge. From the report: PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020. In a post on LinkedIn, former PopSci editor Purbita Saha commented on the magazine's discontinuation, stating she's "frustrated, incensed, and appalled that the owners shut down a pioneering publication that's adapted to 151 years worth of changes in the space of a five-minute Zoom call."
"PopSci is a phenomenal brand, and as consumer trends shift it's important we prioritize investment in new formats," Herbert tells The Verge. "We believe that the content strategy has to evolve beyond the digital magazine product. A combination of its news team, along with commerce, video, and other initiatives, will produce content that naturally aligns with PopSci's mission." PopSci will continue to offer articles on its website, along with its PopSci Plus subscription, which offers access to exclusive content and the magazine's archive.
"PopSci is a phenomenal brand, and as consumer trends shift it's important we prioritize investment in new formats," Herbert tells The Verge. "We believe that the content strategy has to evolve beyond the digital magazine product. A combination of its news team, along with commerce, video, and other initiatives, will produce content that naturally aligns with PopSci's mission." PopSci will continue to offer articles on its website, along with its PopSci Plus subscription, which offers access to exclusive content and the magazine's archive.
Rest In Peace (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, hard to be surprised but the writing was on the wall. I used to be a subscriber. I actually like getting paper magazines, but that experience is pretty much dead now. It just got way too expensive and by the time the articles got into print they were barely worth reading. However, I have to wonder if there is still interest but these "executive" just need to "pivot their evolutionary buzzwords" to justify their salaries. Oh well. Rest in peace!
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:4, Insightful)
If a magazine article isn't worth reading by the time it got to print then it wasn't a magazine, it was trying to be "news". A good magazine has articles worth reading even years later.
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Either that, or it became a picture book like Life and National Geographic. When I was a kid, NG had fantastic articles as well as good pictures. Then the prestige of their photography soared, seemingly at the expense of their writers. It went from being something where I set aside an afternoon for each article, to something I thumbed through in 5 minutes. It had always been a birthday gift from my father, and I told him to think of something else. We had a 20 year run of it in our house though. I'll
A pity but... (Score:3)
I don't blame them (Score:3)
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The "new shiny tech gadget and car" type of "Science" that Popular Science mostly wrote about is still popular. You can still get your daily fix of that content from Engadget and The Verge.
It really didn't make sense to make a magazine out of this content anymore, because it becomes stale before it gets printed.
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The real issue is that magazines as a medium are rapidly becoming an anacronism. They're not as close to extinction as newspapers, but they're riding on a railroad that only goes in that direction.
Popular Science doesn't want to be the next Sears, a company that steadfastly resisted the so
Scientific American and National Geographic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Scientific American and National Geographic (Score:4, Interesting)
That one actually worries me. A lot of the pop-sci mags dont hold much interest for me partly because as I have a lot better grasp on how professional science works I've come to realise many of the pop-sci mags dont really do a good job of explaining to the public where science is actually at, particularly physics.
But SciAm is the real deal, and for the most part gets the science right. Moving online only can be a real death knell for these mags, I remember the local free bands and entertainment mag here in western australia, XPress, going online only. That thing was essential to anyone going out to see bands and the like. The Gig Guide was the lifeblood of the local music scene. But now... well it still exists, but you'd be forgiven for not realising that. Its now just something you occasionally see reminders of when a band reposts one of their articles. I cant imagine they have anything like the scope and reach they used to. Before you could head into town, drop by a burger joint to grab a meal before the shows, and pick up the XPress and see what shows are on. Now? Not so much
Now, sure its a bit different with big distribution pop-sci stuff. But part of the appeal of buying these popsci mags is they make great coffee table reading. I've always kept a pile of them on the the coffee table for people to browse when they visit and I'm in the kitchen cooking them dinner, or whatever. I guess people can now just stare at their phones. Thats a depressing thought.
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The back issues of SciAm are quite lovely. When I was in high school I had access to a bunch of them and the back page had math problems and thought experiments that brought me no end of entertainment. I'll be sad to see them go when that happens. :(
Not sad enough to subscribe though, which is an odd bit of cognitive dissonance. I'll have to ponder that.
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I know a lot of "serious" scientists look down their nose at SA but public oriented science journalism is critical to current and future support of scientific R&D. SA fills in the gap between hard science and fluff pieces. The fact that the articles are usually written by the researchers themselves makes them especially insightful. SA was great for exposing me to other fields I didn't really know well but at a level far better than anything I'd find in the general press or even the vast majority of s
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The alternative really is hot trash like Omni or New scientists where every weird mathbrained possibility is a "Stunning discovery" and warp drives are "within our reach".. Its all good and fun to read until you realise your neighbor actually thinks its where we are at.
Forget printing (Score:2)
Scientific American is going on 180 years, but I wonder how much longer they'll be printing issues.
The way things are going I'm starting to wonder how much longer there'll be any scientific Americans.
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I dropped my subscription when they went woke. The issues had been getting thinner and thinner too, and more of the articles were written by "science writers" not researchers.
Then they flipped from " there is no such thing as race' to 'race exists and is the only thing that matters'. Add to that an entire article about how James Webb was evil and needed to be cancelled and I was done.
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If you want people to read, dont post AC.
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National Geographic has stopped (Score:2)
We covered it laying off its staff writers in June https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] and within a month they announced end of production.
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We covered it laying off its staff writers in June https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] and within a month they announced end of production.
What do you mean by "they announced end of production"?
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That's a misrepresentation of the actual story. They are still giving feature-piece assignments to their huge rolodex of freelancers. They still have editors; they're still publishing. They haven't announced an "end of production" - they just won't be sending print editions to newsstands for retail sales. Subscribers continue to receive it in the mail. Please cultiv
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National Geographic too. When those two stop printing it will hurt.
I cancelled my subscription when Murdoch bought National Geographic expecting the worse. Since then I have seen some articles about Jesus on the news stands plus other odd issues on the covers. It may not have been as bad as I thought, but I am sure they are slowly wading into "pseudo science" land. Also I do not want to avoid paying for any Murdoch content if at all possible.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/14/how-fox-ate-national-geographic
https://www.skeptical-science.com/people/national-geo
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Also I do not want to avoid paying for any Murdoch content if at all possible.
I meant to say "Also I want to avoid paying for any Murdoch content if at all possible."
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They were never exactly serious to begin with. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: They were never exactly serious to begin with. (Score:1)
The art that I always remember, these days, is where they show self-driving cars, separated from pedestrians, in their futuristic sky city...
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PopSci was always a lot heavier on the "pop" than the "sci."
I find that's often the case when doing science outreach. The more real science you include the less popular it becomes. Include too much science and you'll shrink your audience to the point where it is unpopular science.
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But popular educational media always degenerates into tabloid hackery
It's certainly true that a lot of modern "educational" media has focussed purely on being popular and only makes a pretense of the science. The BBC used to do a very good job of striking a balance between the two but recently even that seems to have gone downhill.
Print is dead. (Score:2)
"Print is dead."
— Egon Spengler, ca. 1984
Okay. Tldr version is they can't fill a magazine (Score:3)
Which basically means they fired all the people who could write worth a damn and have lost the ability to produce content. Because if you can produce content, bundling it in a "magazine" is small potatoes.
I'll take as a comparison the AIAA magazine Aerospace America I get every month or so. There are at most a half dozen articles, only one or two of which span more than a few pages, and maybe half as many regular columns. The whole thing looks to be generated by no more than 10 people, most of whom have their gmail or other institutional email in their blurb, meaning they're either freelancers or have some othet day job. And yet the content they produce in their less-than-full-time activities is worth reading more than occasionally.
One time a few years ago they did a deep dive on this Navy Pilot Reports UFO bullshit and the writer went and dug up some old patents for weirdo weather balloons with the instrument package inside balloon envelope that could very well have been the "cube in a sphere" out of one such Navy pilot report. No alienz! required.
Does anyone seriously expect the likes of Popular Science or its ilk to have been able to pull of such a feat of...basic research skills in science journalism...over the past few decades?
The question should answer itself. They didn't hire competent people and the old subscribers they had by inertia from when they may have been good have beamed up to the mothership. So they just push clickbait and ads and soon will have to phone home too to that big glue factory in the sky.
As a former, long-time subscriber (Score:2)
Fade away to irrelevance (Score:2)
By not being on the shelf, a browser cant casually discover it.
By being invisible as a download that you must seek out which requires prior knowledge, it will simply fade away into irrelevance.
My local newsagent, WH Smith, is FULL of magazines and periodicals. By simply scanning a shelf I can be advertised to, by a front cover. When I go in there to get copies of my regular ones, you as a publication have a significant chance of catching my eye. It's even in the library, archived there too.
But now you re