The Fall of Scientific American

This quote was when I know something was seriously wrong with the magazine I read assiduously as a child: > Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-m... - and I am not quoting out of context)

Get an issue of Scientific American from the past few years and compare with one from the early 90s. It will become obvious why Scientific American no longer has readers.

I suscribe to Le Scienze, which was founded in 1968 as the Italian translation of Scientific American. You might find that weird but knowledge of English was not common back then. Furthermore it contains local articles and other local content. However it's still mostly a translation of most of the articles of SciAm, from one or two months before. Sometimes I read them in advance in English from the links here on HN. It's run by an Italian editor, they've got a contract with SciAm but they are not part of the same business group. It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine. However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition. Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.

I've been thinking a lot about this example of decline, and the conclusion I've come to is that as print media has lost relevance and power, the only people willing to fill the remaining roles are those people who have ideological axes to grind. Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.

I've been a continuous subscriber since the early 1980s. The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.) It's improved a lot over the last few years. Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.