The downfall of National Geographic(jjpryor.substack.com) |
The downfall of National Geographic(jjpryor.substack.com) |
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Adventur...
It ran from 1999 - 2009, and put out exactly the National Geographic content you'd expect.
Expedition-focused, with interesting stories and details about places around the world.
Sadly, I can't find an archive of their articles. They seem to be scrubbed from the main Nat Geo site?
But here's a general gist of the type of publication it was: https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/17
Edit: A peek at an anthology: https://books.google.com/books?id=Pb8_ASogrbsC&printsec=fron...
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.
>The IP fans continue to buy each product. Some will be optimistic, some will be pessimistic, doesnt matter, they will continue to buy.
Source: I'm one of those OOT/MM fans. But admittedly so, the 2D Zelda's were great. I imagine these were different teams that peaked at different times. Windwaker was most definitely a game 3 for me, with TP being a game 4, with all the signs of a game 4. Now we are getting average-mediocre open world games with Zelda IP skinned on them. Its hard to say BOTW is anything like Majoras mask who had somewhere between 7-10x more unique enemy types. This one and Blizzard(Starcraft/warcraft/diablo) hurts the most in retrospect.
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.
What on earth are they doing as a non profit to justify keeping that stash safe from taxation?
They are stashing 1.6 billion bucks is what they're doing. Regardless of how pure the original motives may be for any foundation or non-profit, if they get enough money in them they will be taken over by the soul-less financiers.
For a significant portion of time, National Geographic was the only culturally acceptable and accessible place in the United States one could see photographs of nude women (and men).
I would guess there were millions of boys across multiple generations in the United States who saw their fist photo of a nude woman in National Geographic.
Even in the otherwise prudish Bible Belt of the United States, where Playboy would be completely verboten, even the church pastor would have an entire bookshelf devoted to National Geographic.
Then with evolving social mores, Nation Geographic had to cut down on the nudity. In addition, nudity became very, very accessible because of the Internet. These two trends cut down on one of the hidden reasons people purchased National Geographic.
Kids today would see more graphic stuff just by googling for their favorite cartoon character. :-O
I think they've been hijacked by some media/financial money-grubbing soulless web lizards, but hey maybe it just looks like that from the outside.
I wish big trusts like that (and like the Hewlett foundation) could be sued when they veer from their madate into ordinary base activities like hoarding money and fooling people into donating.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/business/media/national-g...
This unwind is MBA spreadsheet driven, not actual supply / demand driven.
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?
Generally speaking, the free content you love then uses the original reporting from these kinds of outlets and delivers poorly written nth degree xeroxes of that novel info.
At the end of the day, someone has to actually go out onto the polar ice or the remote research station and generate the story. So that’s the point imo.
It used to be that the content was much much better than any of the things you mentioned. When the content quality became the same as the things you mentioned, this is what happens.
The web is brimming with more new stuff than you can eat, which spells doom for NG.
Not sure if you mean "new stuff" in general, or content/stuff of the same quality. For things like news I feel like you can either pay for really high quality content, get the shitty ad supported content or just drink from the firehose of social media.
It's hard not to assume that other types of content isn't the same. You can either get rehashed content based on Wikipedia articles or shitty click-bait articles, but actual investigating work is really rare and expensive. So you either have to buy "the book" on a topic, get research articles or rely on the few YouTubers who spend money on going places.
We have more content than ever before, sadly much of it is opinion pieces, blatant attempts to trick the all might algorithm to release advisering dollars or respins of the very real work of a few people.
Will we see a resurgence of a new form of personalized research replacing this void for which folks will be willing to pay for? Is there a need for intermediaries in the space? Does direct publishing and direct to consumer media and publications have a place?
Then National Geographic showed up when I was teenager but it started to enshitify rather quickly with sensationalism and cliffhanger.
I’ve been reading NGM for decades. The content is still top notch in the latest issues. It’s as good as it’s ever been.
Here is an example, from 2016, which, regardless of your views, which does seem blatantly political.
They put a 9 year old trans child on the cover.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/12/19/trans-...
There's quite a bit of money in online media and quite a bit of demand for it, including the type of reported media described here. Not all of it, and not every model works in the internet era, but enough to matter and make the story look very different than it does today absent actual illegal conduct.
Due to anti-competitive behavior, various forms of advertising fraud, and obvious violations of various antitrust laws, basically all the money was siphoned off to make people at Google and Facebook rich.
Worth noting that the point of view I'm outlining here is not some old man screaming conspiracy theories, it's the official point of view of the United State Department of Justice:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
Decent explainer:
https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/google-is-stealing-from-...
As a general life heuristic, every time you see someone saying "well yeah that's just like the natural way the market works nothingcouldabeendoneaboutit" you should be highly, highly suspicious.
The real problem is when the old things die and nothing has really filled their niche. NG is a good example, I think.
Traditional media has become replaced by Social media.
A good Youtube Adventure film, such as a tour of a beach town or historic town, a safari documentary, or a foodie tour, scratches my adventure itch quite well-- along the same vein as a magazine article, yet a film feels more sensory-immersive.
That said, I discontinued my subscription decades ago for some reason. I don't remember why.
"This research follows on a 2014 study of North American newspapers which examined annual financial reports for publicly traded chains and found that none posted an annual loss on an operating basis between 2006 and 2013. An analysis of UK newspaper company financial reports was thus performed to determine whether predictions of extinction similar to those made in North America are likewise unfounded and to compare their performance. Results showed more variation than in the U.S. and Canada. Most UK newspapers are still profitable, but not as profitable as before. The Times, historically a loss maker, has moved to profitability in recent years with the introduction of a paywall for its online content. The same paywall reduced the advertising revenues of News Corp’s Sun and was thus dropped."
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.
I'm especially confused given how Fox - not particularly known for its (left-leaning) political correctness - bought National Geographic in 2015, and partnered with Nat Geo back in 1997 to start the National Geographic Channel.
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.
Where can this be found?
I remember teachers would solicit old magazines from parents for this purpose. I would never allow them to give away National Geographic though... they were definitely a magazine worth saving.
That being said, NG is nowhere near the train-wreck that Scientific "Feelings" American has become. Sometimes it seems like one big op-ed piece, but it's re-centered itself a bit over the last 12 months.
We have subscription to "National Geographic KIDS" , which our kids devour inside out. I really think its great. It would be sad to lose it.
I would recommend the subscription to every parent looking for a non-digital window into learning about the world. Perfect gift for a 5-9 year old, IMO.
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.
The kids content they put out is great, we don't get the magazine (probably should) but have 3 or 4 of the big encyclopedia's and they're fantastic.
Then there's Breath of the Wild (2017) running laps around them at 30 million. The sequel just came out and it's already at 10 as of numbers released in the first week.
But there is nothing that I've seen that fills the niche that NG filled at all. If you just want a shallow look at another place, then yes, there is plenty of that online. But that wasn't NG's thing.
It's not just NG. We have lost quite a lot of really valuable things, never to be replaced with anything comparable.
It is OK for things to change, even if unfortunately your tastes don't change with them.
Idk man, I glanced at /truezelda the other day and it seems like TotK has ruined BOTW for people. I was already disenchanted about 20 hours into BOTW, climbing yet another green hill to see another green hill with the same enemies as the last hill. I did beat the game with 70 or 80 shrines. I dread shrines.
I admittedly played every zelda, despite ragging on them. I am said IP fan.
I just want a 3D Zelda game with interesting biomes, multiple enemy types, fun puzzles, etc...
We got a open world rpg with Zelda skinned on it. It would be nice to get a classic 3D Zelda game and call this one something else.
I have doubts BotW would have gotten great reviews if it was released as an xbox game with different characters.
At any rate, I don't own a Switch, I've only played the games with my nephew. I'm only observing the commentary I see from friends and family around me, and the less Nintendo-dedicated reaction.
Side note: have you played Tunic? You may like that!
This was mentioned as a backscratching thing.
Edit: I'm assuming this is the article and I still don't see the agenda here. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-d...
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.
Interpreting cool as "absolutely not Republican" seems like a tacit acknowledgement that the Republicans have severely damaged their brand. Perhaps by their embrace of MAGA.
We might just be accepting it because we have nostalgia for the characters.
I remember people saying TP was the greatest game of all time. That aged poorly too.
I don't know why I play every Zelda game. I feel the compulsion to do so.
I didn't even like BOTW but I felt the need to beat it.
Look at people's obsession with Disney, the grown adults who go to disney like its their job have some sort of mental illness, why is it so hard to think that Nintendo didn't do something similar? They both market primarily to children, who have no concept of corporate mascots.
TotK jacks up the gameplay creativity to an entirely new level, and has the strong driving story that alot of people complained was missing from BotW. There's also a TON more to explore, which I won't elaborate on to avoid spoilers.
The only 3D Zelda I played before BotW was OoT. I'm enjoying the games on their own terms.
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.