National Geo news makes me kind of sad

I grew up in a magazine-subscribing household.

At one point or another, we got the following kids' mags: Jack & Jill, Calling All Girls, Boys' Life, Seventeen. I'm sure there were a few others. (We got to read Highlights at our dentist's office.)

Non-kids magazines were also plentiful: Newsweek, Look, Readers Digest, Catholic Digest. Sports Illustrated. Sporting News, Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Family Circle. My father got the monthlies from the VFW and American Legion (even though he thought the American Legion was fascist-adjacent.) In addition to Catholic Digest, there were a couple of Catholic mags in the mix. And at some point when I was in high school, we started getting the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, thanks to my sister Kath. (We got to read the pulpy Argosy at Vic the (Blind) Barber's, where Kath and I got our bangs trim, and where my brothers - accompanied by me and/or Kath until they got big enough to go it alone - got their "basic boys" cuts.)

I read every magazine that appeared in our mailbox, even the VFW and Legion rags. 

What else came our way?

Why, National Geographic, of course. 

And for someone who'd never been been anywhere other than Worcester, Boston, Chicago, and the Cape, National Geographic was a revelation.

While I read pretty much every word in the other magazines, I don't remember actually reading National Geo. But I loved flipping through the pages and doing some far-flung armchair traveling.

With the exception of the New Yorker and the Atlantic - to which I still subscribe - I haven't read any of the above in years. Probably since my mother died in 2001, when I would have had access to the Digests, Readers and Catholic, and - of course - National Geographic. 

Despite the fact that I haven't read National Geo in ages, I still felt a bit of melancholy when I read that they'd "laid off all of their 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. (Source: Washington Post)

Even before they were clued in last April, I don't imagine this was a surprise to any/many of them. Since 21st Century Fox took control in 2015, there have been thee other layoffs, and a major reorg/deorg. (Disney stepped in in 2019.)

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.

Forty years ago, when people still read magazines, National Geo had 12 million subscribers in the US, plus millions of international readers. Today, the "artisanal product" has fewer than 1.8 million subscribers. And as of next year, if you're not a subscriber but have a hankering to read a copy, you're out of luck. They won't be sold in newsstands. 

Still, given the collapse of the magazine market, National Geo "remains among the most widely read magazines in America."

But we've become a nation of watchers, not readers, and National Geographic's bread and butter is its cable and animal channels. 

While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision.

That high-minded vision dates back to its first issue in 1888.

The magazine has stated that it's still committed to publishing a monthly magazine. They'll just be doing it with freelancers.

I don't know exactly why, but this makes me feel kind of sad.