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
You could argue that there are three American magazines that are so iconic, so central to the last century of American media and public discourse, that they are instantly recognizable just by the color of the border on their covers. Time magazine has the red border, National Geographic has the yellow border, and you’re reading the electronic version of the one with the blue border.
The one with the yellow border, which has been around for 135 years, no longer has any full-time staff writers, and soon it will stop appearing on your newsstands — presuming you can find a newsstand anymore:
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.
This isn’t the end of National Geographic entirely, but it’s a big step in that direction.
You might think, “Oh, it must be that no one subscribes to that magazine anymore,” but that’s not the case. As of the end of last year, National Geographic had 1,784,999 paying subscribers. (We’re on the list at the link. Our number may not seem high compared to the non-political magazines, but you’ll notice that very few political magazines even made the list.) Also note that earlier this year, the National Geographic Society announced that in 2022, it enjoyed the largest fundraising total in its 135-year history, with $117.9 million in new commitments.
You may be surprised to learn that National Geographic has the 12th most popular Instagram account in the world, with more than 238 million followers. (Instagram is making a lot of money, generating an estimated $51.4 billion revenue in 2022. It’s fair to wonder if those who are creating all that popular content that brings users to Instagram are getting the short end of the stick.)
You would think that being part of the Disney empire would ensure the long-term financial and publishing health of a magazine like National Geographic, but obviously the opposite is occurring. Disney has certainly enjoyed leveraging the National Geographic brand into other media — television series and documentaries primarily, with many now offered to audiences through the Disney Plus streaming service. It is fair to wonder if Disney perceives National Geographic as just another entertainment studio within its vast multimedia conglomerate, creating stars out of figures such as Dr. Pol and offering cross-promotion opportunities with Marvel star Chris Hemsworth.
Back in 2015, the National Geographic Society sold 73 percent of the magazine and its related media properties to 21st Century Fox. At the time, Gary Knell, National Geographic Society president and CEO, boasted:
The value generated by this transaction, including the consistent and attractive revenue stream that National Geographic Partners will deliver, ensures that we will have greater resources for this work, which includes our grant making programs that support scientists and explorers around the world. . . . We now will have the scale and reach to continue to fulfill our mission long into the future. The Society’s work will be the engine that feeds our content creation efforts, enabling us to share that work with even larger audiences and achieve more impact. It’s a virtuous cycle.
It hasn’t really worked out that way. Within two years, Disney began the process of purchasing a lot of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets, and Disney finalized the acquisition of Fox’s share of National Geographic in 2019.
You may have noticed that the Disney corporation has been tightening its belt and canceling some high-profile projects after running up an astronomical amount of debt during the pandemic — $54 billion by the middle of 2020. Disney is trying to cut $5.5 billion in costs, a move that will reportedly include cutting 7,000 employees.
It is fair to wonder if Robert Iger sees National Geographic and its magazine as one of Disney’s “core brands.” In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, Iger indicated that programs which aren’t part of the core brands would be appearing less frequently:
Q: What are the influences on how you curate Disney’s output?
Iger: We want to continue to make programs that don’t necessarily fit into one of our core brands, but we probably should make less of them. I think actually curation is a good thing, because it probably forces more discipline on us in terms of quality. The more you make, typically, you dilute quality. And we’re looking to do the opposite.
Q: So, fewer, bigger things?
Iger: Not necessarily bigger. Fewer, better.
(Iger didn’t specify, but it is safe to assume that big names such as Mickey Mouse, Marvel, and Star Wars make the cut.)
A move announced less than eight years ago, which was allegedly going to put National Geographic on a more solid footing, has led to a drastic reduction in the staff of the magazine. It is not difficult to envision National Geographic becoming web-only, following the path of the New York Observer, Seventeen, Teen Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Health, Eating Well, and Parents, among others. ESPN the Magazine became web-only and since then has nearly disappeared, as its content became indistinguishable from the rest of ESPN’s website.
There’s some evidence to suggest that once a publication becomes web-only, its readership falls out of the habit of reading it, having to remember to regularly check yet another website:
By analyzing quantitative audience data from official industry sources, we estimate total time spent with the NME by its British audience fell dramatically post-print — by 72%. This fall mirrors that suffered by The Independent newspaper, which went online-only two years earlier. . . .
We conclude that the attention periodicals attract via their print editions is unlikely to immediately transfer to their online editions should they go online-only. Building a fuller theory of print platform cessation, however — one that also encompasses changes in readership/reach — requires more comparable data. This case study provides further evidence to suggest that though, for newspapers and magazines, a post-print existence may be less costly, it is also more constrained, with much of the attention they formerly enjoyed simply stripped away.
If you feel like misinformation, crazy theories, and crazy ideas are proliferating, it is probably because made-up, crazy, and inaccurate information is free, while accurate information usually isn’t because it takes time and effort to find that accurate information. And as you may have noticed, any old schmo can claim to have highly placed sources just about anywhere.
Yes, this morning newsletter is free. And if you’re reading it, there’s a good chance you think it’s at least pretty good. This is because allegedly I’m good as a gateway drug to the rest of National Review. I also am pretty good at casually mentioning that a year’s subscription to the print magazine is just $30, a year’s subscription to NR Plus is just $49, and a year’s subscription to both is just $65. Oh, and the next National Review Institute cruise is to Alaska in mid June 2024.
You have to pay for content. Or more specifically, you usually have to pay for quality content.
“Information wants to be free!” First, information has no consciousness, which means it has no desires. When people say this, what they mean is that certain people want information to be free. These people are rarely in the position of putting in the effort to find that information and make it coherent or understandable.
TikTok is free, because an entity effectively controlled by the Chinese government really wants to get access to everything that’s on your smartphone. Just about every form of social media is free. If somebody is giving you something for free, there’s a good chance that the product they’re really selling to someone else . . . is you.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, no, food and housing were not cheap in 1980, and every generation faces its own set of benefits and problems. Our old contributor Avi Woolf observes that “so much of politics today is driven by a seriously misguided understanding of how our parents and grandparents lived.”
I liked this observation from Liz Mair, reacting to Nikki Haley’s declaration that life used to be simpler:
I have a theory about why people have nostalgia for “simpler” times that weren’t simpler. In hindsight, we totally know how we’d navigate those times because we already did it. We don’t know how to navigate now, because we’re actively trying to do it in real time.