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Comment by pja | Hacker News Reader

New Scientist has gone horribly, horribly downhill over the last few decades. It’s a pale shadow of its former self :(

I was on the verge of subscribing to it not too long ago till I did some research. It seems to have moved into a more sensationalist click-baitesque sphere.

A shame, but I suppose from their perspective it must have been a case of "if you can't beat them, join them".

I remember them being described as "The National Enquirer of Science" a good 10 years ago.

Just today I was in the Library and looking at "Science" and "Scientific American" both of which seem to be a lot more "popularist" than I remember them from when i was a kid, but maybe I just didn't notice then.

I'm planning on subscribing to one of these, currently favoring Scientific American after flipping through some copies at the library. What (if anything) would people recommend instead?

I work as a scientist, so I don't want over-popularised clickbait.

As a layman I find Scientific American goes into sufficient detail that I learn new things but is still approachable enough for me to grasp. They also seem to generally avoid sensationalist writing, providing plenty of caveats when discussing something theoretical or unproven.

They are no strangers to sensationalism, even outside of click-bait.

A 2009 cover was "Darwin was wrong." It was a sensationalist way to describe that Darwin's thoughts on a tree-of-life is incorrect, because there is also horizontal gene transfer. Not that it matters, as his proposal for evolution is based on the more general 'descent with modification'.

For many years I used to subscribe to them (both Digital and Print) and received my issues on weds/thurs every week through my letterbox.

After a while, it became abundantly clear that the main articles were always 'leaked' to other news sites ahead of the issue publication (as a promotional thing I guess), and more often than not, I found that I had already read all the key information of the articles online up to 3 days before my weekly New Scientist hit the doormat.

It led me to question what exactly I was paying for, so I canceled my subs. I did lose full access to their website, but as I'm just an armchair scientist, that's no real hardship to be honest.

Would you recommend something else instead?

I would be interested if there is something out there between New Scientist and 'full on' peer reviewed journals that I'd probably not be able to digest.

EDIT : I am a member if IEEE - if anyone knows a way to get a 'better' Spectrum magazine format please let me know too!

Scientific American fills this role.

American Scientist: http://www.americanscientist.org/

New Scientist was always aimed at the general reader, but like many other publications they've gone downhill in the web era, aiming for clicks above all else. The freeloading public must share the blame for this. If you find a magazine you like, please subscribe so they can pay their bills.

I inherit the copies my father gets. It certianly isn't what it was which as you say is sad. I shall look into this publication, thanks for the mention.

I think quanta magazine is fairly decent.

Science News [1] is a small, bi-weekly publication that is much less heavy on advertising and dumbed-down articles. I have let my paper subscription lapse (along with most magazines I once took), but it is a good alternative.

1: https://www.sciencenews.org/

It was never very good to begin with (at least since 1990).

Even into the 90s, my (biotech) employer at the time would advertise in New Scientist because that’s where the readership was. I agree that it wasn’t great then, but today’s NS is another level of awful.

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