The downfall of National Geographic

Style over substance. The people "rebuilding" the city aren't construction workers, they're cool kids with tattoos. The "See Detroit" article (which for whatever reason, Meet Detroit is redirected to as well) is even titled Tough, Cheap, and Real, Detroit Is Cool Again. As I replied to your sibling comment, cool means not Republican.

And that's not to say it's not okay for a majority not Republican city to be the obvious, not Republican. I live in such a city myself, probably publicly derided just about as much as Detroit.

> FROM HIS STUDIO a few blocks from MyLocker, Antonio “Shades” Agee, the graffiti artist who’s painting it, isn’t surprised that Hake only recently discovered Detroit’s gloom. It’s easiest to stay on the city’s bright side.

> Agee grew up in Detroit. His Hispanic mother still lives in his childhood home, now one of the few on the block, in a neighborhood he doesn’t like to visit. It’s not “the new Detroit.” Nor was Black Bottom, Detroit’s vibrant Harlem, where his father played jazz. It was bulldozed in the 1950s for redevelopment and a freeway.

> At 44, he is trim from biking; he rarely drives. His right arm—“my painting arm”—is densely tattooed. From the multi-tinted panes of his loft in a former paintbrush factory, Agee has watched Corktown change. He’s a regular at the Detroit Institute of Bagels, just below his window, built for a cool half million dollars. “It still blows my mind to see a girl running down the street and she’s not being chased,” he says.

> “You can’t save Detroit. You gotta be Detroit.”

Wow, very cool.

The underlying case being made is something about what makes a city worth living in. Some people think it's safety. Some people think it's roads (yuck). Walkability. Small businesses. Good schools. Etc. Etc. Etc. And all of these things are argued over and over again by citizens. This National Geographic article stakes a claim that the single most noteworthy aspect of a city is its coolness. The city has to be cool. Your neighbor should be a "graffiti artist." And, I'll admit, there could be a point here. Culture and community are important to a lot of, perhaps even most, people.

You may not see this as political, but I do. I don't hate it, but I wouldn't pay for it as it wasn't at all what I remember from poring over National Geographic magazines in my childhood. I wanted a window into parts of the natural world that I cannot see myself, not Detroit. The frame itself is a political statement: Detroit is a city worth discussing.

This appears to be a form of projection, where you think you can internet bully me into liking an article about cool tattooed people by telling me it's an "internalized" problem.

But I moved on from it. I canceled my subscription. I'll never give NG money, and you're just going to have to deal with that. Sorry. Maybe you can give them your money.

NatGeo was basically a middle-brow collection of interesting stuff. Not every article was interesting to you, maybe you like animals, maybe you liked maps, maybe you liked pictures of some tribe. You'd read the article that excited you and perhaps squeeze a bit of juice out of the rest of it.

Nowadays I have HN. There's a whole bunch of stuff, I can never read it all, there's pictures in all the links, and there's a few interesting articles each day that keep me coming back.

And it's free.

What's the point in buying a content aggregator when I can see a variety of stuff from Aeon/Quanta/bunch of blogs for nothing at all?

they're profitable because they have to be. certainly no investor is willing to eat losses to fund their negative growth curves.

they do/did so via cutting off all r&d and investment in the future first, and then by iteratively cutting and laying off from the present expenses next. profits have been extracted by riding the model into the ground.

places that have survived with paywalls do so making a tenth the money with twice the audience. they're only surviving and profitable in the sense that they won the race to the bottom, not because broad swathes of society are getting valuable information about their interests.

the decent into heavily opinion/chatter oriented content was not the cause of the decline, it was an inevitable byproduct of cutting the budget for all the writer headcount. a 20 year process of replacing 40 and 50 somethings who had health insurance and a week to work on something with 20 and 30 year olds who had a daily postcount and viewcount to hit. when you don't have time to leave your chair, all you have to talk about are your thoughts and feelings.