This is sad. I grew up with this magazine, and it was the one mag that was never thrown away.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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End of an era.
That era ended about 10 years ago. Maybe more.
How so?
The era of prestigious print journalism has been circling the drain at least that long.
I get what you mean. There is no editorial support and too much outsourcing of quality control.
I haven't actually seen a National Geographic for years, but I think that's a distribution issue.
This was the last magazine I was still subscribed to, and they just sent me a renewal notice… well I guess this makes that decision easy. No way I’m paying the (fairly expensive) renewal price for a magazine that is gutting itself into a death spiral.
Don't worry they'll still be paying freelance writers half what they paid the staff writers with no job security or benefits. I'm sure they'll attract the best.
Gradually they'll skimp on the freelance writers until they're phased out entirely, with 100% of the articles being written by chatgpt.
Already in progress, I note. Only a month ago CNET took stock of how they handled their AI-generated articles after discovering 53% of them to be riddled with errors. In April the German tabloid Die Aktuelle was forced to fire their editor-in-chief after publishing an AI-generated interview with the reclusive former F1 racer Michael Schumacher.
Schumacher had been very protective of his private life even before retirement, and in 2013 suffered a paralyzing brain injury that left him struggling to communicate at all. Understandably, his family sued.
But I'm sure the promise of free content churned out lightning fast to please an eager and overly-trusting audience won't be something that worms its tentacles into every publication
/s
:(
My kids school sent home a leaflet for it this week. We were considering the subscription as she loves to learn. This has really made us rethink it, sadly.
This is why I subscribe to the NYT and in a way Minnmax (for games journalism). If you can afford it, news (no matter what sector) is too important not to pay for.
I get what you're saying but people shouldnt have to pay for such an important thing. Obviously news publications need money somehow but paying for news should never be required.
So how do you pay journalists, photographers, designers, editors? (an ex-journalist asks).
If you wanted to treat news as so important that individuals don't have to pay, you would use a Public Service broadcasting model, which treats news as a public good provided to everyone and funded through taxes.
(someone so old they remember life before economic neoliberalism replies).
People are shitting on Germans public broadcasting and its fee a lot and there have been a couple of actual scandals, but all in all the news and investigative pieces they produce are so important.
A minimal payment for getting a thing like news seems absolutely reasonable. It was the case for hundreds of years, it requires money to produce...
That’s what you get for selling out to Mews Corp.
RIP Nat Geo.
It is sad to see the death spiral of print journalism. The constant barrage of TV news and its highly negative tone is poisoning society. I feel life was more peaceful when news came in papers in the morning and evening editions. There was no user tracking or analytics. While you had tabloids, you also had quality papers focused on plain news and opinions in the opinion pages. I feel the world at least in terms of news consumption has changed for the worse.
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