Bobby Burack
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National Geographic has laid off each of its remaining staff writers.
Individuals announced their departures on social media Wednesday.
“Today is my last day at National Geographic,” tweeted former science writer Michael Greshko.“The magazine is parting ways with its staff writers, including me.”
The Washington Post reports the following:
“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.”
Adding:
“The magazine’s current trajectory has been years in the making, set in motion primarily by the epochal decline of print and ascent of digital news and information. In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.”
National Geographic had more than 1.7 million subscribers at the end of 2022. At its peak, in the late 1980s, the magazine recorded as many as 12 million subscribers.
There are a slew of reasons for the fall, though none bigger than the declining use of paper magazines.
Challenging it has been for magazines to replace the lost revenue with the advent of free online articles.
Still, National Geographic will continue to publish monthly magazines. Specifically, the company will turn to lowly-paid freelancer writers to fill the content void.
The move comes as parent company Walt Disney Co. continues to slash jobs across its various entities.
Elsewhere at Disney, its sports network ESPN prepares for a round of talent layoffs to the tune of $30 million. ESPN employees expect the cuts to begin in the next few weeks.
To be honest, National Geographic was one of the last Disney properties worth consuming.
NG bought into global warming theories years ago and frequently bloviates about it. I’m sure NG is at Davos with all the Lear-Jetted envitonmental elitists (algore). Maybe the free-lancers will be able to publish more circumspect articles with regard to politically correct issues, you know, like both sides of issues. I missed the fact that Disney owns NG too, now publishing all the nonsense is making sense.
NG had become just another woke voice – no longer worth reading.
As Daniel mentions above, once they went all-in on the leftist nonsense agenda they lost a lot of credibility on other subjects and it made it unreadable. Anything with Disney fingerprints that goes the way of the dodo is a win for everyone.
So NG doesn’t need staff to regularly produce for online subscribers? Or is this cost cutting a result of having to respond to the toxic woke, inhouse environment at Disney and its subsidiary companies, where the chimps ran the zoo into massive stock problems?
Anyway, I can see why they’re in trouble from a product point of view, dropping subscribers – not just the obvious print element – as their content has a woke taint to it that won’t stand the test of time in any syndication!
I couldn’t find regularly fresh material on my digital subscription and it reduced even more when nearly every single doco smacks you over the head with woke concepts and non fact based climate change assertions.
Once again, consumers voting with their dollar.
Isn’t it amazing how disposable income is the driver of corporate America? When a Marxist ideology deliberately creates a recession, the paying public determine what’s essential spending and the virtue signalling hubris of corporations determine if they can keep being part of the propaganda machine, or have to ultimately save their own jobs!