The downfall of National Geographic | Hacker News Reader

The downfall of National Geographic

jjpryor.substack.com

115 points4monthsaway113 comments

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_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

Edit: A peek at an anthology: https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=fron...

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.

The story of Battlefield, only now the clueless newbies they hired to underpay & make it believed it must be a Battle Royale.

Zelda's not the best example of this-- their mainline releases are fantastic as ever.

Nintendo was also already a corporate behemoth by the time OoT came out.

That is the larger organization, there are microcosms inside each company.

But OOT was a AAA title already, and there were already several wildly successful Zelda games before OOT too. There's so many reasons why Zelda is, if anything, a counterexample to this phenomenon.

I wondered about that line too. As big a hit as OOT was, it just barely beats LTTP once all the re-releases are considered. The original NES game was comparable. Link's Awakening (1993) stopped just short of 10 million, beating them all.

Then there's Breath of the Wild (2017) running laps around them at 30 million. The sequel just came out and it's already at 10 as of numbers released in the first week.

You might be falling into the

>The IP fans continue to buy each product. Some will be optimistic, some will be pessimistic, doesnt matter, they will continue to buy.

Source: I'm one of those OOT/MM fans. But admittedly so, the 2D Zelda's were great. I imagine these were different teams that peaked at different times. Windwaker was most definitely a game 3 for me, with TP being a game 4, with all the signs of a game 4. Now we are getting average-mediocre open world games with Zelda IP skinned on them. Its hard to say BOTW is anything like Majoras mask who had somewhere between 7-10x more unique enemy types. This one and Blizzard(Starcraft/warcraft/diablo) hurts the most in retrospect.

This is a bit of a reach. To a very large many, the two most-recent Legend of Zelda games are the two best that have ever been made. Nintendo has not been afraid to change what the game even when it initially upsets people (Windwaker with the 3D cutesy feel) though the subsequent sentiment is almost always incredibly positive in retrospect. BOTW isn't like Majora's Mask anymore than Majora's Mask was like A Link to the Past.

It is OK for things to change, even if unfortunately your tastes don't change with them.

>the two most-recent Legend of Zelda games are the two best that have ever been made.

Idk man, I glanced at /truezelda the other day and it seems like TotK has ruined BOTW for people. I was already disenchanted about 20 hours into BOTW, climbing yet another green hill to see another green hill with the same enemies as the last hill. I did beat the game with 70 or 80 shrines. I dread shrines.

I admittedly played every zelda, despite ragging on them. I am said IP fan.

I just want a 3D Zelda game with interesting biomes, multiple enemy types, fun puzzles, etc...

We got a open world rpg with Zelda skinned on it. It would be nice to get a classic 3D Zelda game and call this one something else.

I have doubts BotW would have gotten great reviews if it was released as an xbox game with different characters.

I don't think a place like /truezelda would capture common sentiment, do you? This is a place where there will be stronger opinions, more engagement, and more nostalgia too.

At any rate, I don't own a Switch, I've only played the games with my nephew. I'm only observing the commentary I see from friends and family around me, and the less Nintendo-dedicated reaction.

Side note: have you played Tunic? You may like that!

Lenna's Inception, too.

https://lennasinception.com/

BOTW and TOTK are two of the highest rated games of all time. If you want to persuade people of your case, you would do well not to use a hot take as your example.

>BOTW and TOTK are two of the highest rated games of all time.

This was mentioned as a backscratching thing.

I guarantee that I, and most other people who fawn over the two newest Zeldas aren't doing so because of manufactured hype.

That is a strong claim. Especially when Nintendo marketed to us as a child.

We might just be accepting it because we have nostalgia for the characters.

I remember people saying TP was the greatest game of all time. That aged poorly too.

The strong claim is that I, and most people, actually enjoy what we say we enjoy? That is dangerous levels of cynicism.

Yes. You might be enjoying it due to deep seated nostalgia developed from Nintendo marketing to us as children.

I don't know why I play every Zelda game. I feel the compulsion to do so.

I didn't even like BOTW but I felt the need to beat it.

Look at people's obsession with Disney, the grown adults who go to disney like its their job have some sort of mental illness, why is it so hard to think that Nintendo didn't do something similar? They both market primarily to children, who have no concept of corporate mascots.

If nostalgia is as powerful as you say, why are new sonic games so unpopular? Also, I loved BOTW, but I never played any Zelda games as a kid.

Speak for yourself then. I liked BotW so much that the first time I beat it (going to Hyrule Castle after only doing 2 Divine Beasts because I wanted to see how good the equipment there was that the side characters were talking about), I immediately replayed the Ganon fight and went back to playing the rest of the game for its own sake. At this point I have over 600 hours in it, and still haven't even done all the side quests since I have so much fun just exploring Hyrule and finding different ways to kills mobs.

TotK jacks up the gameplay creativity to an entirely new level, and has the strong driving story that alot of people complained was missing from BotW. There's also a TON more to explore, which I won't elaborate on to avoid spoilers.

The only 3D Zelda I played before BotW was OoT. I'm enjoying the games on their own terms.

To me they are just examples for demonstration - not absolute fact.

yep... you start with passionate founders who were the key to success, and then water them down with company growth

Use DICE and the once-legendary Battlefield series as an example.

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.

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.

> It makes sense that often the old things have to die for the new things to truly take over the ecological niche.

The real problem is when the old things die and nothing has really filled their niche. NG is a good example, I think.

> nothing has really filled their niche

Traditional media has become replaced by Social media.

A good Youtube Adventure film, such as a tour of a beach town or historic town, a safari documentary, or a foodie tour, scratches my adventure itch quite well-- along the same vein as a magazine article, yet a film feels more sensory-immersive.

> Traditional media has become replaced by Social media

But there is nothing that I've seen that fills the niche that NG filled at all. If you just want a shallow look at another place, then yes, there is plenty of that online. But that wasn't NG's thing.

It's not just NG. We have lost quite a lot of really valuable things, never to be replaced with anything comparable.

I'd argue that Vice News's website-news articles partially filled the void of NG, with their travel adventure content. It was basically the web-form of a magazine.

Could be! I'm not familiar with their travel-adventure stories.

vice that just declared bankruptcy after torching a billion in VC to fill that void. the void is back.

Not exactly, no. Most newspapers are profitable. The mostly non-newspaper titles you list were all chasing the over-saturated market for liberal commentary and opinion.

http://marcedge.com/jombs.pdf

"This research follows on a 2014 study of North American newspapers which examined annual financial reports for publicly traded chains and found that none posted an annual loss on an operating basis between 2006 and 2013. An analysis of UK newspaper company financial reports was thus performed to determine whether predictions of extinction similar to those made in North America are likewise unfounded and to compare their performance. Results showed more variation than in the U.S. and Canada. Most UK newspapers are still profitable, but not as profitable as before. The Times, historically a loss maker, has moved to profitability in recent years with the introduction of a paywall for its online content. The same paywall reduced the advertising revenues of News Corp’s Sun and was thus dropped."

you have the facts correct and their meaning wrong.

they're profitable because they have to be. certainly no investor is willing to eat losses to fund their negative growth curves.

they do/did so via cutting off all r&d and investment in the future first, and then by iteratively cutting and laying off from the present expenses next. profits have been extracted by riding the model into the ground.

places that have survived with paywalls do so making a tenth the money with twice the audience. they're only surviving and profitable in the sense that they won the race to the bottom, not because broad swathes of society are getting valuable information about their interests.

the decent into heavily opinion/chatter oriented content was not the cause of the decline, it was an inevitable byproduct of cutting the budget for all the writer headcount. a 20 year process of replacing 40 and 50 somethings who had health insurance and a week to work on something with 20 and 30 year olds who had a daily postcount and viewcount to hit. when you don't have time to leave your chair, all you have to talk about are your thoughts and feelings.

A much more accurate description of what's actually happened is that all the profits of the news media industry were captured by an oligarchy that was able to successfully (and illegally) take over and dominate the market for digital advertising.

There's quite a bit of money in online media and quite a bit of demand for it, including the type of reported media described here. Not all of it, and not every model works in the internet era, but enough to matter and make the story look very different than it does today absent actual illegal conduct.

Due to anti-competitive behavior, various forms of advertising fraud, and obvious violations of various antitrust laws, basically all the money was siphoned off to make people at Google and Facebook rich.

Worth noting that the point of view I'm outlining here is not some old man screaming conspiracy theories, it's the official point of view of the United State Department of Justice:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

Decent explainer:

https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/google-is-stealing-from-...

As a general life heuristic, every time you see someone saying "well yeah that's just like the natural way the market works nothingcouldabeendoneaboutit" you should be highly, highly suspicious.

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.

"...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?

> 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.

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).

That's what I would assume. Also, while significant, $1.6B wouldn't put it especially near any of the top US university endowments.

If by 'operate' you mean 'pay executives and lawyers exorbitant retainers' then I suppose you are right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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-g...

This unwind is MBA spreadsheet driven, not actual supply / demand driven.

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.

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?

>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.

Content creator, not aggregator. National Geographic generated the stories itself and provided some of the best photography obtainable in the history of the medium.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

Maybe high-quality physical print that looks good on a bookshelf. Similar to how vinyl records are thriving in the streaming music era

Print is needed, more than ever. Anything that's online can vanish in a heartbeat.

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

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.

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.

Just this year the publisher of GEO (Gruner+Jahr) axed most of the special edition series of GEO like GEO Wissen and GEO Epoche.

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!

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

> 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.

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!!!!!"

https://archive.is/r5uHq

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.

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-...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-d...

Thanks for finding it.

Style over substance. The people "rebuilding" the city aren't construction workers, they're cool kids with tattoos. The "See Detroit" article (which for whatever reason, Meet Detroit is redirected to as well) is even titled Tough, Cheap, and Real, Detroit Is Cool Again. As I replied to your sibling comment, cool means not Republican.

And that's not to say it's not okay for a majority not Republican city to be the obvious, not Republican. I live in such a city myself, probably publicly derided just about as much as Detroit.

> FROM HIS STUDIO a few blocks from MyLocker, Antonio “Shades” Agee, the graffiti artist who’s painting it, isn’t surprised that Hake only recently discovered Detroit’s gloom. It’s easiest to stay on the city’s bright side.

> Agee grew up in Detroit. His Hispanic mother still lives in his childhood home, now one of the few on the block, in a neighborhood he doesn’t like to visit. It’s not “the new Detroit.” Nor was Black Bottom, Detroit’s vibrant Harlem, where his father played jazz. It was bulldozed in the 1950s for redevelopment and a freeway.

> At 44, he is trim from biking; he rarely drives. His right arm—“my painting arm”—is densely tattooed. From the multi-tinted panes of his loft in a former paintbrush factory, Agee has watched Corktown change. He’s a regular at the Detroit Institute of Bagels, just below his window, built for a cool half million dollars. “It still blows my mind to see a girl running down the street and she’s not being chased,” he says.

> “You can’t save Detroit. You gotta be Detroit.”

Wow, very cool.

The underlying case being made is something about what makes a city worth living in. Some people think it's safety. Some people think it's roads (yuck). Walkability. Small businesses. Good schools. Etc. Etc. Etc. And all of these things are argued over and over again by citizens. This National Geographic article stakes a claim that the single most noteworthy aspect of a city is its coolness. The city has to be cool. Your neighbor should be a "graffiti artist." And, I'll admit, there could be a point here. Culture and community are important to a lot of, perhaps even most, people.

You may not see this as political, but I do. I don't hate it, but I wouldn't pay for it as it wasn't at all what I remember from poring over National Geographic magazines in my childhood. I wanted a window into parts of the natural world that I cannot see myself, not Detroit. The frame itself is a political statement: Detroit is a city worth discussing.

How is "Detroit is actually cool" and "cool young people with tattoos" a political agenda?

The idea presented in the article conveys to people that being cool is important and good. Cool is also code for Democrat or, at least, absolutely not Republican.

This sounds like an internalized problem that you have, and not something the magazine did themselves.

The literal title of the article mentions coolness.

This appears to be a form of projection, where you think you can internet bully me into liking an article about cool tattooed people by telling me it's an "internalized" problem.

But I moved on from it. I canceled my subscription. I'll never give NG money, and you're just going to have to deal with that. Sorry. Maybe you can give them your money.

You're clearly more emotional about the subject than anyone else in this thread. For what it's worth, the "internalized" problem I was referring to was suggesting that National Geographic was some kind of propadanga that pushed "democrat = cool".

Yeah, some people take offense when a stranger attempts an unsolicited psychoanalysis over the internet.

That seems a stretch. I mean, cowboys were cool to 8 year old me and are still pretty cool to 48 year old me, and I'm pretty sure they would be Republicans. Ditto racecar drivers, fighter pilots etc.

Interpreting cool as "absolutely not Republican" seems like a tacit acknowledgement that the Republicans have severely damaged their brand. Perhaps by their embrace of MAGA.

I definitely think the content is dumbed down compared to my issues from ten years ago. Regarding the political stuff, I'd say there's a notable lean in the writing but imo that isn't the worst offender in it's decline.

The kids content they put out is great, we don't get the magazine (probably should) but have 3 or 4 of the big encyclopedia's and they're fantastic.

somewhat true. My cousin unsubscribed after 9/11 due what he saw as the magazine's forced moral equivalency of all cultures. "Cannibals, they're just like us!" not exactly his words, but the general sentiment.

That being said, NG is nowhere near the train-wreck that Scientific "Feelings" American has become. Sometimes it seems like one big op-ed piece, but it's re-centered itself a bit over the last 12 months.

They dumbed down long before that, that was just when you noticed. It was that success in the 80s that largely killed them, because they realized that their brand pushed product. The business turned to commercial branding or retail stores and selling random stuff, culminating in becoming one of the random logos on a bland Korean fashion brand. My guess is that many who were turned off because they "went woke" loved it when it was cranking out low quality tat or opening retail stores in tourist areas.

There's still plenty of room for high-quality writing about the world and its inhabitants; although the US is up its own ass there's the internet now. It's not a business where hundreds of millions of dollars should be involved.

> There's still plenty of room for high-quality writing about the world and its inhabitants;

Where can this be found?

I don't know of a single place where you can consistently can find "high-quality writing about the world and its inhabitants" as on former NG. There are quality articles but they are scattered against the vast deserts of the Internet.

All over. the hard part is finding it. Some of it gets linked here. A lot of blogs are in depth writing about some niche in the world. (the vast majority are of course low effort drivel, but there is still more high quality content out there than you have time to read)

High Country News, Adventure Journal, Hakai magazine all carry the torch in some form or another.

Do you have specific examples of what you mean by “concentrated on political correctness”? I absolutely agree that they dumbed down their content, but I think that’s more of a misguided push to appeal to a more general audience which just alienates their original core base. I remember seeing stuff like Doomsday Preppers being advertised several years ago which seemed antithetical to the magazines I remember my dad getting when I was a kid. It’s all quite sad…

Same here.

I'm especially confused given how Fox - not particularly known for its (left-leaning) political correctness - bought National Geographic in 2015, and partnered with Nat Geo back in 1997 to start the National Geographic Channel.

I think it was more about generating headlines and causing a stir so they could stay relevant. The politics part was just a tool.

It's so sad. NatGeo started stumbling in the late 1990's/early 2000's. I had the same experience as the author... stacks of magazines in the basement... getting lost exploring the world. In elementary school we had extra stacks we could use to cut out pictures for projects.

How much of this is due to not having the internet during the time NatGeo's heyday? During that time, the only way accessible to see that kind of content was with their magazine. That was also a time before 24/7 channels of content. Today, there are so many documentaries, TV shows, TV channels, YouTube channels, streaming platforms, websites all offering some form of content similar to NatGeo (if some of it wasn't directly lifted from NatGeo I'd be amazed). Now, we have scanners and printers, so cutting magazine pages is no longer necessary. Times have changed, and the nostalgia lingers hard

They used to send full fledged expeditions, with authors, science experts and world renowned photographers on board. To most extreme and dramatic places: deserts, jungle, active warzones, mountaintops, the Arctic and so on. Which produced really in-depth reports with great penmanship often accompanied by masterpieces of photography. And while the world is much better traveled now it's rarely done by well funded teams collected for the purpose.

These other content producers are doing the same things with perhaps the exception of writers. Look at the expeditions BBC has done to have an excuse to use Attenborough. Netflix has a few series doing similar. These expeditions haven't gone away, just their presentation in this format has.

> In elementary school we had extra stacks we could use to cut out pictures for projects.

I remember teachers would solicit old magazines from parents for this purpose. I would never allow them to give away National Geographic though... they were definitely a magazine worth saving.

My favorite type of article from NG was when they did stories on things like Rodeo life, earthquake aftermath, shipwreck, New Orleans, etc., usually with an interesting angle but not much of politics, more about the thole, plight, dreams, realities of life, etc., sometimes punctuated by a momentary gleam. But it’s not been like that for a while.

Caption…

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.

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