11 ms·

The downfall of National Geographic

115 points by 4monthsaway 3y ago

passwert 3y ago
Are there any alternatives? In german speaking countries we have GEO magazine, but IMO the quality is also decreasing every year.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Yeah, in France I grew up on Geo. Then National Geographic showed up when I was teenager but it started to enshitify rather quickly with sensationalism and cliffhanger.
- soco 3y ago
  Are all those things indeed decreasing quality, or are we all getting old and missing those "old times"? As teenagers we definitely had different expectations from newspapers, music, life in general... maybe we are just not their target anymore.
- omnibrain 3y ago
  Just this year the publisher of GEO (Gruner+Jahr) axed most of the special edition series of GEO like GEO Wissen and GEO Epoche.
beej71 3y ago
I'd love to see archive.org pick up a full collection. It looks like they have a handful.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
For a fabulously wealthy national non-profit treasure, they sure have squandered their reputation. Instead of exploring those thousands of new buildings discovered by lidar in the Yucatan, they're putting up articles about bug repellents, summer holiday destinations or cocktails before bed. I think they've been hijacked by some media/financial money-grubbing soulless web lizards, but hey maybe it just looks like that from the outside. I wish big trusts like that (and like the Hewlett foundation) could be sued when they veer from their madate into ordinary base activities like hoarding money and fooling people into donating.
DeathArrow 3y ago
I lost interest in NG since they dumbed content down and concentrated on political correctness and being on the "right" side of the political spectrum instead of providing interesting, deeply researched and meticulously planned articles and caring more for the scientific truth instead of the political truth.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  Is this true ? I haven't seen the magazine in a very long time, so I don't have a way to opine. It would be great to back this statement with facts. We have subscription to "National Geographic KIDS" , which our kids devour inside out. I really think its great. It would be sad to lose it. I would recommend the subscription to every parent looking for a non-digital window into learning about the world. Perfect gift for a 5-9 year old, IMO.
  - brvsft 3y ago
    I remember getting a subscription and canceling it immediately after getting my first issue, somewhere around 2015. It was about how Detroit is actually a very cool city and had photos and interviews of cool young people with tattoos. Simply not what I remembered of the magazine as a child. And I have no problem with tattoos, just the strange political agenda that had nothing to do with the environment or animals. I know they also covered peoples in past issues as well (e.g. iconic photo of woman from Afghanistan with striking eyes). This was clearly quite different from that.
    - thisGuyFlicks 3y ago
      I'm failing to see the political agenda in an article about Detroit that features pictures of people that may or may not have tattoos. Edit: I'm assuming this is the article and I still don't see the agenda here. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-detroit.html https://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-d...
      - deleted 3y ago
andrewstuart 3y ago
National Geographic was a window into nature, knowledge and new worlds back in the days before the web. The web is brimming with more new stuff than you can eat, which spells doom for NG.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > The web is brimming with more new stuff than you can eat, which spells doom for NG. Not sure if you mean "new stuff" in general, or content/stuff of the same quality. For things like news I feel like you can either pay for really high quality content, get the shitty ad supported content or just drink from the firehose of social media. It's hard not to assume that other types of content isn't the same. You can either get rehashed content based on Wikipedia articles or shitty click-bait articles, but actual investigating work is really rare and expensive. So you either have to buy "the book" on a topic, get research articles or rely on the few YouTubers who spend money on going places. We have more content than ever before, sadly much of it is opinion pieces, blatant attempts to trick the all might algorithm to release advisering dollars or respins of the very real work of a few people.
ObviousOutage 3y ago
https://archive.is/r5uHq https://archive.is/r5uHq
PaulHoule 3y ago
I had a subscription in the really 00’s which I canceled when they ran an ad on the back that visually suggested somebody would drive a Toyota SUV in a straight line from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon.
g8oz 3y ago
"...And at the same time, the group that started the magazine, the National Geographic Society, which used to run on a budget of millions, now has 1.6 billion dollars in its piggy bank." What on earth are they doing as a non profit to justify keeping that stash safe from taxation?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  > What on earth are they doing as a non profit to justify keeping that stash safe from taxation? They are stashing 1.6 billion bucks is what they're doing. Regardless of how pure the original motives may be for any foundation or non-profit, if they get enough money in them they will be taken over by the soul-less financiers.
  - dr-detroit 3y ago
    [dead]
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  I think savings like this are typically used as an endowment? they can hold on to it and operate off of the interest (would love if someone can confirm/deny this).
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    If by 'operate' you mean 'pay executives and lawyers exorbitant retainers' then I suppose you are right.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    That's what I would assume. Also, while significant, $1.6B wouldn't put it especially near any of the top US university endowments.
jgalt212 3y ago
> 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/business/media/national-geographic-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/business/media/national-g... This unwind is MBA spreadsheet driven, not actual supply / demand driven.
hospitalJail 3y ago
This isnt exclusive to NG. This phenomena exists for seemingly every IP. I'll give video games as an example because it seems so clear cut and many people experienced this cycle already. >A company starts out relatively small and is able to turn a profit or attract investment. They continue to be relatively unknown. >The company releases their first breakout hit (Halo, Morrowind or Oblivion, Zelda OOT). The employees who worked on this have been at the company for about 5-10 years. >The employees of the company are excited about how their hard work paid off, and are excited to expand on their previous success with their coworkers and teams. Their second hit is on par, or exceeds the previous release. (Halo 2, Oblivion or Skyrim depending on if you though Skyrim was a great game, Zelda Majoras Mask) The original employees mentioned now have worked at the company for 10-15 years. >The downfall begins, between poaching, rivalries, promotions, opportunistic new hires, the teams are transformed. >The next release has mixed reviews. The hype machine and the backscratching between reviewers and producers(Driver3 scandal as a proven example) leads to favorable reviews despite something being wrong with the game. Many users are less impressed, but those obsessed with the IP at this point are fine to ignore flaws. >The following release is nothing like the breakout hit, but the IP fans continue to buy. At this point the company has been sold, teams have almost 0 original workers. These are different products, with the IP skinned over the top of them. >The IP fans continue to buy each product. Some will be optimistic, some will be pessimistic, doesnt matter, they will continue to buy.
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  Use DICE and the once-legendary Battlefield series as an example.
- stefan_ 3y ago
  The story of Battlefield, only now the clueless newbies they hired to underpay & make it believed it must be a Battle Royale.
- moolcool 3y ago
  Zelda's not the best example of this-- their mainline releases are fantastic as ever.
cagenut 3y ago
Nearly every single newspaper and magazine company has the exact same revenue and subscriber growth chart over the last 20 years. Its a roughly 30-degree angle down and to the right, from a high around 2000 to todays near bankrupcy across the board. Everybody got laid off, everything is produced by freelancers hitting wordcount and postcount metrics by the hour. There's nothing special about NatGeo here, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Wired, across the board. Even the digital upstarts ready to disrupt and replace them have all flopped now, having never actually had a plan beyond "i dunno what if web pages instead?". Huffpo sold for a dollar, buzzfeed shut down its news division, vice went bankrupt, gawker got murdered, mic and ozy were scams. gizmodo jezebel and deadspin run into the ground by private equity. Vox limps along aimlessly, the atlantic is an insipid clickfarm. The recent drama at reddit is essentially the end of this trajectory/narrative. Magazines and local papers were places for communities to organize around and communicate with, we have subreddits for that (and other niche fora like the very one you and I are communicating on right now), but as the recent IPO related drama and layoffs have shown, there's baaaaaaarely a business model there. Serving communities that used to support hundreds of magazines with tens of thousands of paying subscribers. HN only works because its a glorified content marketing strategy for the epicenter of the zirp/vc bubble. It makes sense that the internet changed everything. It makes sense that often the old things have to die for the new things to truly take over the ecological niche. The last 20 years has been the death of media (the content side) as a business. Theres not a ton of point in picking apart why any one given dinosaur like NG died. The internet-meteor did them all in.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  They are constitutionally different. They are a non-profit, do (did) fund their own research around the globe, and reported on real things you couldn't find anyplace else. That said, I discontinued my subscription decades ago for some reason. I don't remember why.
- yeezyszn 3y ago
  This is the most cogent and succinct explanation for what happened. The future for print magazines is a lot more niche and lot more pricey. The internet ate the mass-market in every sphere.
ncphil 3y ago
Visited DC in 2010 or so. Kids were eager to see Nat Geo headquarters. Turned out to be a big disappointment. Lots of empty spaces where displays had been. We were told they were renovating. Looks like they've now lost a lot of their experienced writers, but I wonder about the photographers and artists who were the real stars of the show. On one hand, it's amazing they lasted this long against the Internet and digital media, on the other I can't help but wonder if trying to run a knowledge resource like Nat Geo like a business no longer makes sense.
ethbr0 3y ago
To me, the spirit of National Geographic magazine was carried forward into their Adventure magazine, which was sadly under-advertised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Adventure_(magazine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Adventur... It ran from 1999 - 2009, and put out exactly the National Geographic content you'd expect. Expedition-focused, with interesting stories and details about places around the world. Sadly, I can't find an archive of their articles. They seem to be scrubbed from the main Nat Geo site? But here's a general gist of the type of publication it was: https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/17 https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/17 Edit: A peek at an anthology: https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=frontcover https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=fron...
throwaway4311 3y ago
For National Geographic, I wonder if there is another dimension that isn’t talked about: Nudity For a significant portion of time, National Geographic was the only culturally acceptable and accessible place in the United States one could see photographs of nude women (and men). I would guess there were millions of boys across multiple generations in the United States who saw their fist photo of a nude woman in National Geographic. Even in the otherwise prudish Bible Belt of the United States, where Playboy would be completely verboten, even the church pastor would have an entire bookshelf devoted to National Geographic. Then with evolving social mores, Nation Geographic had to cut down on the nudity. In addition, nudity became very, very accessible because of the Internet. These two trends cut down on one of the hidden reasons people purchased National Geographic.
- bregma 3y ago
  The nudity was tolerated as long as the subjects were natives. No naked "regular people" appeared in the pages of National Geographic. Which does point to one of the causes for people complaining that it's gone down hill and isn't what it used to be, and other code language.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    One exception I recall, a family of anthropologists were dancing with natives in a village and one photo showed their teen daughter with the others, topless as well. I remember it well.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Oh man, I remember my cousin telling me that his dad had nude NatGeos in his basement. :-) Kids today would see more graphic stuff just by googling for their favorite cartoon character. :-O
mercurialsolo 3y ago
Do you see more of this collapse of written media houses? With willingness to pay for media at an all time low + cost of production of writing going to near zero, the demise of online media publications is near inevitable. Will we see a resurgence of a new form of personalized research replacing this void for which folks will be willing to pay for? Is there a need for intermediaries in the space? Does direct publishing and direct to consumer media and publications have a place?
- jiveturkey42 3y ago
  Maybe high-quality physical print that looks good on a bookshelf. Similar to how vinyl records are thriving in the streaming music era
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    Print is needed, more than ever. Anything that's online can vanish in a heartbeat.
fhars 3y ago
At least the north american subcontient is safe now: https://web.archive.org/web/20040810221240/http://www.jir.com/geographic.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040810221240/http://www.jir.co...
jrh3 3y ago
NatGeo physical maps are still pretty awesome. We have their atlas too, which is really great.
lachlan_gray 3y ago
I found a heap of their magazines from the 60’s and 70’s in the recycling at my university, and boy are they a good read. I think one reason they used to be so good (speculating) was that the internet didn’t exist. It was a medium where you could regularly learn out about distant things like peculiar mountain goats or an arctic tribe and get a firsthand report of it. Now there’s no shortage of interesting things like that to read, so maybe it’s not a viable strategy for a print magazine.
- indymike 3y ago
  I think they lost their way when they made the foray into operating multiple TV channels. Suddenly, they went from slow, deep, content to having to have lots of content quickly all the time. I'd still be a subscriber, but the quality dropped significantly in the 00's.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The internet didn't exist and travel, perhaps especially exotic/adventure travel, was a much more rarified thing--so National Geographic was this window into a world that the vast majority of people would never encounter anywhere else.
  - chinchilla2020 3y ago
    exotic/adventure travel is even more rare nowadays. The rise of social media has funneled most travelers towards a few high-infrastructure hotspots like Bali, Yellowstone, and Barcelona. Historically, travel was performed much more 'blind', rather than following the internet-registered locations and reviews.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I don't know the effect in absolute terms but certainly there's less terra incognito from the perspective of Westerners than there was when the Wheelers founded Lonely Planet.
zaps 3y ago
Caption…
lordnacho 3y ago
Isn't this the same as "I'll listen to the song, why buy the album"? NatGeo was basically a middle-brow collection of interesting stuff. Not every article was interesting to you, maybe you like animals, maybe you liked maps, maybe you liked pictures of some tribe. You'd read the article that excited you and perhaps squeeze a bit of juice out of the rest of it. Nowadays I have HN. There's a whole bunch of stuff, I can never read it all, there's pictures in all the links, and there's a few interesting articles each day that keep me coming back. And it's free. What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?
- dylan604 3y ago
  >What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all? It used to be that the content was much much better than any of the things you mentioned. When the content quality became the same as the things you mentioned, this is what happens.
- edavison1 3y ago
  The ‘content aggregator’ supported fantastic original reporting, increasing the share of knowledge in the world. Generally speaking, the free content you love then uses the original reporting from these kinds of outlets and delivers poorly written nth degree xeroxes of that novel info. At the end of the day, someone has to actually go out onto the polar ice or the remote research station and generate the story. So that’s the point imo.
- gaoshan 3y ago
  Content creator, not aggregator. National Geographic generated the stories itself and provided some of the best photography obtainable in the history of the medium.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    True but it was still a hodgepodge of interesting stuff. They funded different people to make various content so to the consumer you saw a bunch of varied articles and pictures.
Fiahil 3y ago
In a recent French parody show, National Geographic was renamed _National Catastrophic_. It probably doesn't help them that most of the content we see oversea is a remake of "American white man vs Shark!!!!!"
crhulls 3y ago
There are interspersed comment saying the downfall started when they went woke. There is also similar interspersed pushback saying this isn’t true. Here is an example, from 2016, which, regardless of your views, which does seem blatantly political. They put a 9 year old trans child on the cover. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/19/trans-girl-9-makes-history-national-geographic-cover/95584058/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/19/trans-...
- ereriara 3y ago
  It's appalling what the mother did to that kid on the cover. I think we'll look back on this in years to come and recognize this as child abuse. I feel really sad for him being gaslit and used as a political prop by a parent eager for fame.
clsec 3y ago
In the early 70's my grandparents gave me their collection of NG. It was complete from about 1920 to the early 1960's when my grandfather retired from the Air Force & built his own sail boat to travel the world. The discoveries I made, and the knowledge I gained, from that collection were awesome!
zagrebian 3y ago
> With the advent of digital media, the meticulously curated, visually spectacular, and deeply researched articles of National Geographic appear to have fallen out of favor. I’ve been reading NGM for decades. The content is still top notch in the latest issues. It’s as good as it’s ever been.
lurquer 3y ago
Good riddance. I still remember when some degenerate Natl Geo photographer seduced my mother while he was up here taking pictures of bridges or some such nonsense.
reset2023 3y ago
what we need is a really good app for this magazine. As an early adapter I am passed the era of social media and really hoping/looking for an alternative. Infinite scrolling that is not stupid and/or negative.
wandering23 3y ago
[dead]

115 points by 4monthsaway 3y ago

Are there any alternatives? In german speaking countries we have GEO magazine, but IMO the quality is also decreasing every year.

dopidopHN 3y ago
Yeah, in France I grew up on Geo. Then National Geographic showed up when I was teenager but it started to enshitify rather quickly with sensationalism and cliffhanger.
soco 3y ago
Are all those things indeed decreasing quality, or are we all getting old and missing those "old times"? As teenagers we definitely had different expectations from newspapers, music, life in general... maybe we are just not their target anymore.
omnibrain 3y ago
Just this year the publisher of GEO (Gruner+Jahr) axed most of the special edition series of GEO like GEO Wissen and GEO Epoche.

beej71 3y ago

I'd love to see archive.org pick up a full collection. It looks like they have a handful.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

For a fabulously wealthy national non-profit treasure, they sure have squandered their reputation. Instead of exploring those thousands of new buildings discovered by lidar in the Yucatan, they're putting up articles about bug repellents, summer holiday destinations or cocktails before bed. I think they've been hijacked by some media/financial money-grubbing soulless web lizards, but hey maybe it just looks like that from the outside. I wish big trusts like that (and like the Hewlett foundation) could be sued when they veer from their madate into ordinary base activities like hoarding money and fooling people into donating.

DeathArrow 3y ago

I lost interest in NG since they dumbed content down and concentrated on political correctness and being on the "right" side of the political spectrum instead of providing interesting, deeply researched and meticulously planned articles and caring more for the scientific truth instead of the political truth.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
Is this true ? I haven't seen the magazine in a very long time, so I don't have a way to opine. It would be great to back this statement with facts. We have subscription to "National Geographic KIDS" , which our kids devour inside out. I really think its great. It would be sad to lose it. I would recommend the subscription to every parent looking for a non-digital window into learning about the world. Perfect gift for a 5-9 year old, IMO.
- brvsft 3y ago
  I remember getting a subscription and canceling it immediately after getting my first issue, somewhere around 2015. It was about how Detroit is actually a very cool city and had photos and interviews of cool young people with tattoos. Simply not what I remembered of the magazine as a child. And I have no problem with tattoos, just the strange political agenda that had nothing to do with the environment or animals. I know they also covered peoples in past issues as well (e.g. iconic photo of woman from Afghanistan with striking eyes). This was clearly quite different from that.
  - thisGuyFlicks 3y ago
    I'm failing to see the political agenda in an article about Detroit that features pictures of people that may or may not have tattoos. Edit: I'm assuming this is the article and I still don't see the agenda here. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-detroit.html https://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-d...
    - deleted 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago

National Geographic was a window into nature, knowledge and new worlds back in the days before the web. The web is brimming with more new stuff than you can eat, which spells doom for NG.

mrweasel 3y ago
> The web is brimming with more new stuff than you can eat, which spells doom for NG. Not sure if you mean "new stuff" in general, or content/stuff of the same quality. For things like news I feel like you can either pay for really high quality content, get the shitty ad supported content or just drink from the firehose of social media. It's hard not to assume that other types of content isn't the same. You can either get rehashed content based on Wikipedia articles or shitty click-bait articles, but actual investigating work is really rare and expensive. So you either have to buy "the book" on a topic, get research articles or rely on the few YouTubers who spend money on going places. We have more content than ever before, sadly much of it is opinion pieces, blatant attempts to trick the all might algorithm to release advisering dollars or respins of the very real work of a few people.

ObviousOutage 3y ago

https://archive.is/r5uHq https://archive.is/r5uHq

PaulHoule 3y ago

I had a subscription in the really 00’s which I canceled when they ran an ad on the back that visually suggested somebody would drive a Toyota SUV in a straight line from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon.

g8oz 3y ago

"...And at the same time, the group that started the magazine, the National Geographic Society, which used to run on a budget of millions, now has 1.6 billion dollars in its piggy bank." What on earth are they doing as a non profit to justify keeping that stash safe from taxation?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
> What on earth are they doing as a non profit to justify keeping that stash safe from taxation? They are stashing 1.6 billion bucks is what they're doing. Regardless of how pure the original motives may be for any foundation or non-profit, if they get enough money in them they will be taken over by the soul-less financiers.
- dr-detroit 3y ago
  [dead]
micromacrofoot 3y ago
I think savings like this are typically used as an endowment? they can hold on to it and operate off of the interest (would love if someone can confirm/deny this).
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  If by 'operate' you mean 'pay executives and lawyers exorbitant retainers' then I suppose you are right.
- ghaff 3y ago
  That's what I would assume. Also, while significant, $1.6B wouldn't put it especially near any of the top US university endowments.

jgalt212 3y ago

> 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/business/media/national-geographic-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/business/media/national-g... This unwind is MBA spreadsheet driven, not actual supply / demand driven.

hospitalJail 3y ago

This isnt exclusive to NG. This phenomena exists for seemingly every IP. I'll give video games as an example because it seems so clear cut and many people experienced this cycle already. >A company starts out relatively small and is able to turn a profit or attract investment. They continue to be relatively unknown. >The company releases their first breakout hit (Halo, Morrowind or Oblivion, Zelda OOT). The employees who worked on this have been at the company for about 5-10 years. >The employees of the company are excited about how their hard work paid off, and are excited to expand on their previous success with their coworkers and teams. Their second hit is on par, or exceeds the previous release. (Halo 2, Oblivion or Skyrim depending on if you though Skyrim was a great game, Zelda Majoras Mask) The original employees mentioned now have worked at the company for 10-15 years. >The downfall begins, between poaching, rivalries, promotions, opportunistic new hires, the teams are transformed. >The next release has mixed reviews. The hype machine and the backscratching between reviewers and producers(Driver3 scandal as a proven example) leads to favorable reviews despite something being wrong with the game. Many users are less impressed, but those obsessed with the IP at this point are fine to ignore flaws. >The following release is nothing like the breakout hit, but the IP fans continue to buy. At this point the company has been sold, teams have almost 0 original workers. These are different products, with the IP skinned over the top of them. >The IP fans continue to buy each product. Some will be optimistic, some will be pessimistic, doesnt matter, they will continue to buy.

chinchilla2020 3y ago
Use DICE and the once-legendary Battlefield series as an example.
stefan_ 3y ago
The story of Battlefield, only now the clueless newbies they hired to underpay & make it believed it must be a Battle Royale.
moolcool 3y ago
Zelda's not the best example of this-- their mainline releases are fantastic as ever.

cagenut 3y ago

Nearly every single newspaper and magazine company has the exact same revenue and subscriber growth chart over the last 20 years. Its a roughly 30-degree angle down and to the right, from a high around 2000 to todays near bankrupcy across the board. Everybody got laid off, everything is produced by freelancers hitting wordcount and postcount metrics by the hour. There's nothing special about NatGeo here, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Wired, across the board. Even the digital upstarts ready to disrupt and replace them have all flopped now, having never actually had a plan beyond "i dunno what if web pages instead?". Huffpo sold for a dollar, buzzfeed shut down its news division, vice went bankrupt, gawker got murdered, mic and ozy were scams. gizmodo jezebel and deadspin run into the ground by private equity. Vox limps along aimlessly, the atlantic is an insipid clickfarm. The recent drama at reddit is essentially the end of this trajectory/narrative. Magazines and local papers were places for communities to organize around and communicate with, we have subreddits for that (and other niche fora like the very one you and I are communicating on right now), but as the recent IPO related drama and layoffs have shown, there's baaaaaaarely a business model there. Serving communities that used to support hundreds of magazines with tens of thousands of paying subscribers. HN only works because its a glorified content marketing strategy for the epicenter of the zirp/vc bubble. It makes sense that the internet changed everything. It makes sense that often the old things have to die for the new things to truly take over the ecological niche. The last 20 years has been the death of media (the content side) as a business. Theres not a ton of point in picking apart why any one given dinosaur like NG died. The internet-meteor did them all in.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
They are constitutionally different. They are a non-profit, do (did) fund their own research around the globe, and reported on real things you couldn't find anyplace else. That said, I discontinued my subscription decades ago for some reason. I don't remember why.
yeezyszn 3y ago
This is the most cogent and succinct explanation for what happened. The future for print magazines is a lot more niche and lot more pricey. The internet ate the mass-market in every sphere.

ncphil 3y ago

Visited DC in 2010 or so. Kids were eager to see Nat Geo headquarters. Turned out to be a big disappointment. Lots of empty spaces where displays had been. We were told they were renovating. Looks like they've now lost a lot of their experienced writers, but I wonder about the photographers and artists who were the real stars of the show. On one hand, it's amazing they lasted this long against the Internet and digital media, on the other I can't help but wonder if trying to run a knowledge resource like Nat Geo like a business no longer makes sense.

ethbr0 3y ago

To me, the spirit of National Geographic magazine was carried forward into their Adventure magazine, which was sadly under-advertised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Adventure_(magazine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Adventur... It ran from 1999 - 2009, and put out exactly the National Geographic content you'd expect. Expedition-focused, with interesting stories and details about places around the world. Sadly, I can't find an archive of their articles. They seem to be scrubbed from the main Nat Geo site? But here's a general gist of the type of publication it was: https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/17 https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/17 Edit: A peek at an anthology: https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=frontcover https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=fron...

throwaway4311 3y ago

For National Geographic, I wonder if there is another dimension that isn’t talked about: Nudity For a significant portion of time, National Geographic was the only culturally acceptable and accessible place in the United States one could see photographs of nude women (and men). I would guess there were millions of boys across multiple generations in the United States who saw their fist photo of a nude woman in National Geographic. Even in the otherwise prudish Bible Belt of the United States, where Playboy would be completely verboten, even the church pastor would have an entire bookshelf devoted to National Geographic. Then with evolving social mores, Nation Geographic had to cut down on the nudity. In addition, nudity became very, very accessible because of the Internet. These two trends cut down on one of the hidden reasons people purchased National Geographic.

bregma 3y ago
The nudity was tolerated as long as the subjects were natives. No naked "regular people" appeared in the pages of National Geographic. Which does point to one of the causes for people complaining that it's gone down hill and isn't what it used to be, and other code language.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  One exception I recall, a family of anthropologists were dancing with natives in a village and one photo showed their teen daughter with the others, topless as well. I remember it well.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Oh man, I remember my cousin telling me that his dad had nude NatGeos in his basement. :-) Kids today would see more graphic stuff just by googling for their favorite cartoon character. :-O

mercurialsolo 3y ago

Do you see more of this collapse of written media houses? With willingness to pay for media at an all time low + cost of production of writing going to near zero, the demise of online media publications is near inevitable. Will we see a resurgence of a new form of personalized research replacing this void for which folks will be willing to pay for? Is there a need for intermediaries in the space? Does direct publishing and direct to consumer media and publications have a place?

jiveturkey42 3y ago
Maybe high-quality physical print that looks good on a bookshelf. Similar to how vinyl records are thriving in the streaming music era
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  Print is needed, more than ever. Anything that's online can vanish in a heartbeat.

fhars 3y ago

At least the north american subcontient is safe now: https://web.archive.org/web/20040810221240/http://www.jir.com/geographic.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040810221240/http://www.jir.co...

jrh3 3y ago

NatGeo physical maps are still pretty awesome. We have their atlas too, which is really great.

lachlan_gray 3y ago

I found a heap of their magazines from the 60’s and 70’s in the recycling at my university, and boy are they a good read. I think one reason they used to be so good (speculating) was that the internet didn’t exist. It was a medium where you could regularly learn out about distant things like peculiar mountain goats or an arctic tribe and get a firsthand report of it. Now there’s no shortage of interesting things like that to read, so maybe it’s not a viable strategy for a print magazine.

indymike 3y ago
I think they lost their way when they made the foray into operating multiple TV channels. Suddenly, they went from slow, deep, content to having to have lots of content quickly all the time. I'd still be a subscriber, but the quality dropped significantly in the 00's.
ghaff 3y ago
The internet didn't exist and travel, perhaps especially exotic/adventure travel, was a much more rarified thing--so National Geographic was this window into a world that the vast majority of people would never encounter anywhere else.
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  exotic/adventure travel is even more rare nowadays. The rise of social media has funneled most travelers towards a few high-infrastructure hotspots like Bali, Yellowstone, and Barcelona. Historically, travel was performed much more 'blind', rather than following the internet-registered locations and reviews.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I don't know the effect in absolute terms but certainly there's less terra incognito from the perspective of Westerners than there was when the Wheelers founded Lonely Planet.

zaps 3y ago

Caption…

lordnacho 3y ago

Isn't this the same as "I'll listen to the song, why buy the album"? NatGeo was basically a middle-brow collection of interesting stuff. Not every article was interesting to you, maybe you like animals, maybe you liked maps, maybe you liked pictures of some tribe. You'd read the article that excited you and perhaps squeeze a bit of juice out of the rest of it. Nowadays I have HN. There's a whole bunch of stuff, I can never read it all, there's pictures in all the links, and there's a few interesting articles each day that keep me coming back. And it's free. What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?

dylan604 3y ago
>What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all? It used to be that the content was much much better than any of the things you mentioned. When the content quality became the same as the things you mentioned, this is what happens.
edavison1 3y ago
The ‘content aggregator’ supported fantastic original reporting, increasing the share of knowledge in the world. Generally speaking, the free content you love then uses the original reporting from these kinds of outlets and delivers poorly written nth degree xeroxes of that novel info. At the end of the day, someone has to actually go out onto the polar ice or the remote research station and generate the story. So that’s the point imo.
gaoshan 3y ago
Content creator, not aggregator. National Geographic generated the stories itself and provided some of the best photography obtainable in the history of the medium.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  True but it was still a hodgepodge of interesting stuff. They funded different people to make various content so to the consumer you saw a bunch of varied articles and pictures.

Fiahil 3y ago

In a recent French parody show, National Geographic was renamed _National Catastrophic_. It probably doesn't help them that most of the content we see oversea is a remake of "American white man vs Shark!!!!!"

crhulls 3y ago

There are interspersed comment saying the downfall started when they went woke. There is also similar interspersed pushback saying this isn’t true. Here is an example, from 2016, which, regardless of your views, which does seem blatantly political. They put a 9 year old trans child on the cover. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/19/trans-girl-9-makes-history-national-geographic-cover/95584058/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/19/trans-...

ereriara 3y ago
It's appalling what the mother did to that kid on the cover. I think we'll look back on this in years to come and recognize this as child abuse. I feel really sad for him being gaslit and used as a political prop by a parent eager for fame.

clsec 3y ago

In the early 70's my grandparents gave me their collection of NG. It was complete from about 1920 to the early 1960's when my grandfather retired from the Air Force & built his own sail boat to travel the world. The discoveries I made, and the knowledge I gained, from that collection were awesome!

zagrebian 3y ago

> With the advent of digital media, the meticulously curated, visually spectacular, and deeply researched articles of National Geographic appear to have fallen out of favor. I’ve been reading NGM for decades. The content is still top notch in the latest issues. It’s as good as it’s ever been.

lurquer 3y ago

Good riddance. I still remember when some degenerate Natl Geo photographer seduced my mother while he was up here taking pictures of bridges or some such nonsense.

reset2023 3y ago

what we need is a really good app for this magazine. As an early adapter I am passed the era of social media and really hoping/looking for an alternative. Infinite scrolling that is not stupid and/or negative.

wandering23 3y ago

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