Why does such a small detail matter in the scope of this large failure? Rather impressed that invoking the DEI boogeyman always seems to distract from the obvious, much larger dysfunction at play in the eyes of those who purportedly champion disrupting the status quo.
At least from my perspective, it feels at least plausibly linked for two reasons.
1) They had 1.8 million subscribers when deciding to shut down. Each subscription cost around $40, so you're looking at $70 million+ in revenue, from the magazine alone. How much does a full time of editors, photographers, reporters, and more actually cost? With many failing industries it increasingly feels like the burden is not coming from operational costs themselves, but from these enormous administrative layers which essentially just drown businesses, yet are the last to see major cuts. If you can [apparently] barely afford to fund your editors, photographers, and more - where exactly should DEI rank on your list of concerns, let alone expenditures?
2) Changes in themes tend to push people away from businesses. I actually had to check the Wiki [1] to make sure I wasn't have some sort of false memory. I wasn't: National Geographic was always an overtly anti-political magazine. For instance it was able to inspire awe about the progress being made during the space race, while sidestepping the fact it was also driving mass militarization. Or give interesting and fun cultural insights across the Iron Curtain of the "enemy" during the Cold War, without at all getting involved in the political dehumanization games of the past (and especially the present).
Now? [2] 'Elephants are in trouble and we're to blame.' 'These Native Americans were taken rom their families as children' 'Kosovo wants to decide its future - but will history hold it back?' 'This scientist analyzes African American's past to inform the present.' 'This ordinary woman hid Anne Frank.' And of course a super-sized serving of focus on typical concerns such as global warming. And I'm not cherry picking. These are literally the headline articles for just this month!? This is how you lose your readers. People don't want to be preached or lectured to about your values, or why they're the worst, most undeserving living 'things' on this planet.
I expect the National Geographic, as many of us remember it, likely died long ago. And that probably happened when the business started being bounced from one mega-corp to another.
> Now? [2] 'Elephants are in trouble and we're to blame.' 'These Native Americans were taken rom their families as children' 'Kosovo wants to decide its future - but will history hold it back?' 'This scientist analyzes African American's past to inform the present.' 'This ordinary woman hid Anne Frank.' And of course a super-sized serving of focus on typical concerns such as global warming. And I'm not cherry picking. These are literally the headline articles for just this month!? This is how you lose your readers. People don't want to be preached or lectured to about your values, or why they're the worst, most undeserving living 'things' on this planet.
I'm sorry, but if you manage to find offense in those topics and consider them too political and preachy, it's 100% a you problem. What exactly is political there more than an article about Chernobyl criticising the Soviet regime's incompetence and trying to lie was? Anne Frank is political and preachy? Or Kosovo's history and attempts at state building? Unless the article about African American's past says that everything wrong is the fault of XYZ living today, how is it preachy or lecturing? And honestly, you lost me at climate change. If you think that's a political topic, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem and are a massive part of it. Which is of course unfortunate because you consider it political preaching to try to educate you about it, and are thus immune to learning better.
The new times where in some countries any topic, including wide ones such as public health or the climate, are "political" and automatically partisan is extremely annoying.
Here [1] is a neat video, put together by National Geographic themselves, showing 130 years of covers. There's a hotkey most don't know about on YouTube. Pause that video somewhere, and you can then use "." and "," to go frame by frame forwards or backwards respectively. And you can see each cover quite clearly, month by month, for 130 years!
I think what you'll find, up until fairly recently, is that the covers are full of exotic topics that by and large you probably have no clue whatsoever about. If you're the curious sort, they probably make you want to crack open those pages just to see what's going on. And I think that is what many of us really remember about National Geographic. They were taking you exploring in places and parts of the world you'd have no idea about, and just showing you things for no real motivation beyond showing neat things to you. It was kind of like being on the HMS Beagle, from the comfort of your couch. And that was a really awesome feeling.
The only time they ever really slipped hard into politics (at least at a fairly lengthy glance) was during WW2, and I think we can probably give them a pass there. Even during e.g. the 60s, with a raging Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and more - they managed to stay focused on discovery. But the new National Geographic seems to have shunned its past and largely turned to identity politics, with a healthy dishing of geopolitics on the sider, into their bread and butter. I don't find that offensive, I simply find it trite. And that's a really bad place to be in for a magazine that was, at one time, about inspiring wonder and awe.
Of course they're free to do such, but readers are also free to decide, "You know, this just isn't for me anymore."
> But the new National Geographic seems to have shunned its past and largely turned to identity politics, with a healthy dishing of geopolitics on the sider, into their bread and butter.
When about do you think they made this shift? In my opinion, 2015, when Murdoch got ahold of a majority of the company, was the shift to identity, narrative, rhetoric. You seem to have a better grasp on their history than me, though.
