National Geographic, the 135-year-old imperfect chronicler of the planet and its people, is shrinking to a shell of its former self.
The magazine laid off all its staff writers, eliminated its audio department and will no longer be sold on U.S. newsstands beginning next year, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi reports.
“The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming,” Farhi writes. “Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors.”
The story is familiar, especially in 2023, a year of record media cuts. This year’s layoffs are so far outpacing even 2020, when the onset of the pandemic eliminated tens of thousands of media jobs. Small outlets are disappearing. Big outfits are shrinking: The Los Angeles Times. NPR. The Athletic. The Washington Post.
“The magazine’s current trajectory has been years in the making,” Farhi writes, “set in motion primarily by the epochal decline of print and ascent of digital news and information. In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.”
Not anymore.
Some will greet this news with a shrug. A good riddance, even.
National Geographic has a deeply racist history. The magazine acknowledged as much in a note from editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg at the start of its April 2018 issue, which was devoted to race.
“Until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,” Goldberg wrote. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché.”
National Geographic “did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture,” Goldberg wrote after the magazine hired John Edwin Mason, a University of Virginia professor of African history and the history of photography, to assess National Geographic’s full archive and report back his findings.
“Through most of its history,” Mason told the New York Times in 2018, “National Geographic, in words and images, reproduced a racial hierarchy with brown and Black people at the bottom, and white people at the top.”
Editors vowed in 2018 to do better moving forward. Readers can decide for themselves whether they did.
I feel a sense of sorrow at the news of the physical magazine's passing, despite its flaws, because it marks a further fraying of the connective tissue we so desperately need to bind us to one another.
We need voices and photos and perspectives that allow us to walk in a different set of shoes, inhabit one another’s worlds, glimpse one another’s interior lives, recognize one another’s similarities — how we ache, what we fear, who we celebrate, how we love our children with our entire souls.
We need stories.
We need people to find them and tell stories. We need editors to take stock of how stories have been told as well as how stories are being told, and to calibrate, always, toward the fullest and more accurate portrayal of humanity.
“Stories simplify the complicated,” Nancy Prial, a lay leader at the Lake Shore Unitarian Society told those of us gathered a few weeks ago. “And they also complicate the simple.”
They invite us to interrogate our assumptions and examine our blind spots. They grow us into better versions of ourselves.
TikTok is capable of that. Instagram Reels do a version of that. Facebook posts attempt to do that.
And I love all of those things. They hold up a mirror and show us who we’re becoming and make us laugh and make us think and connect us to our college roommates and remind us about our cousins’ birthdays.
But they don’t immerse us in a place, in a life, in a community for long. They drive us by, quickly, on our way to someplace else.
That’s not how connections take hold.
My heart breaks for the people whose jobs are eliminated. I spent 25 years working full time in newsrooms and I watched far too many friends and colleagues love and lose their jobs.
But it also breaks for a world that will be less illuminated, less informed, less tethered together by each other’s stories.
