The downfall of National Geographic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.