Popular Science closes online magazine in another sign of decline

In yet another sign of its decline, Popular Science has stopped publishing its online magazine, three years after it discontinued its legendary print edition, which began in 1872.

Popular Science will continue to publish articles and videos on its website, and will still produce its podcast, “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.”

But the digital magazine, which has been published quarterly since then started in 2021has stopped publishing and will no longer charge for subscriptions, according to Recurrent Ventures, the magazine’s parent company.

The latest online issuetitled ‘Fake’, was published in September and featured articles on taxidermy, artificial intelligence and fake crystals.

“Like most media companies, Recurrent is adapting to the evolving landscape of its audience,” company spokeswoman Cathy Hebert said in a statement Tuesday. “Whether it’s due to changing social media patterns, an increase in consumer demand for video or shifting advertising budgets – which are also increasingly moving towards video – it’s clear that change is a consistent theme.”

The decision came about two weeks later Axios reports this, citing an unnamed source that Recurrent Ventures had cut 13 positions at Popular Science. Only five editorial staff remain at the publication, Axios reports.

Ms. Hebert declined to confirm how many employees had left, but acknowledged “a reduction in headcount across brands and operating teams.”

Recurrent Ventures has been going through its own period of change, having recently announced its own period third CEO in three years. The company was made in 2021 by North Equity, a private equity firm, to manage Popular Science, The Drive, Domino, Field & Stream and other media outlets acquired by North Equity.

The closure of the digital magazine saddened and infuriated some former Popular Science staffers, who noted that the publication’s rich tradition of science journalism began 151 years ago and included articles by Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Isaac Asimov.

Over the decades, Popular Science has explored photography, hovercrafts, gyrocopters, spaceflight, and the battle for more legroom on commercial airplanes, all with the general interest reader in mind. Even in recent years, it won the 2019 National Magazine Awards for ‘The Tiny Issue’, about all things small, and ‘The Heat problem”, on climate change, in 2022.

The magazine was also known for making and offering fantastic predictions about the future quirky DIY projects such as a motorized ‘yard tractor’ that could be built from a kit and a homemade ‘airplane detector’ that could spot enemy aircraft, which was introduced after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“I am frustrated, outraged and shocked that the owners closed a groundbreaking publication that adapted 151 years of changes in the space of five minutes over Zoom,” Purbita Saha, a former deputy editor, wrote on LinkedIn. . She said she was fired on November 13.

“I have some talented colleagues who still produce news, reviews and podcasts for popsci.com, but PopSci magazine will cease to exist,” she wrote.

The cuts came after National Geographic, another venerable science magazine, shed writers and other staffers in a round of layoffs announced in April, months after it fired several top editors last year. Other media outlets, including Buzzfeed, The Los Angeles Times, Vox Media and The Washington Post, have also made staff cuts.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, said the end of Popular Science’s online magazine was another step “toward trying to find a format that’s less expensive and that has some readership.” .”

He said it would be presumptuous to call it “the last step before the graveyard,” but added that it could be “difficult to rebuild and build an advertising base.”

Jacob Ward, former editor-in-chief of Popular Science, said the online magazine’s demise “breaks my heart.” He noted that early print editions featured oil paintings on the covers, such as one he has at home of a man in protective gear filming on the edge of a glowing volcano.

Popular Science was “very beautiful, very historical” and “a real treasure trove of American popular intellectual publications,” he said a video posted on LinkedIn. But he said it was “just a throwaway in the minds of people who make money for a living.”

Joe Brown, who was editor-in-chief from 2016 to 2020, said abolishing the magazine would make it more difficult to unite stories around a common theme and provide the context he said was lacking in much daily journalism. He said he was concerned that remaining staff would have to “feed the beast” to keep the website up to date.

Given the recent layoffs, “I don’t see how they can keep it all up,” he said.