National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The Internet and capitalism don't make a good cocktail.
Then I see this:
> The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co.
It's sad that National Geographic is effectively closing its doors when it's owned by Walt Disney Co., which has yearly revenue of nearly $100 billion. They seriously can't find the miniscule amount of cash in there to support National Geographic's journalism? Walt Disney is one of the most evil and exploitative companies ever, so I suppose I'm not surprised by their actions here.
> National Geographic spokesperson Chris Albert said staffing changes will not affect the company’s plans to continue publishing a monthly magazine
If they don't employ writers, then who is going to be writing the magazine?
Random freelancers on the cheap, with no/less content that needs serious preparation and months/year-long support to create.
I would love to freelance write for a software magazine while being a professional software engineer.
Well there is always chatGPT
I anticipate the opposite.
Already AI content is better than crappy human writers.
In the medium term AI content is going to be better than most human writers (it arguably already is in some limited cases).
In the long term it may compete with the best human writers.
Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.
I do think people are going to get tired of AI-produced this and AI-produced that - they're going to crave content created by humans. At least for some things. There may be a place for AI-created content that we love. That is this whole thing might be a false dilemma, it's not AI or human created content, it's AI and human created content. We'll find out which is better at what.
Well, over half of Americans read below a 6th grade reading level[1], so it seems like AI content is satisfactory, given the median reading skills.
There's a good chance that people who read that magazine have a higher average reading level.
Past tense. It has failed. It's not failing.
It has happened the same way in every areas where you have rampant counterfeit or simply cheaper competition.
As even if LLM can generate greate quality content, it will always be even cheaper to mass produce low quality. And once you cross the Rubicon of not being certified, it is just a matter of time that capitalism/greed will make it a race to the bottom.
That doesn’t mean that LLMs are on a course to inevitably surpass the 90th percentile human writer (which is what most full-time writers presumably are). I may be a Luddite here, but I don’t expect that in my young kids’ lifetime.
If writing is our best attempt to share our personal psychic experience then all LLM can be is fragments of those experiences and can not in itself experience the presence of being that is human.
> Some humans are too full of themselves, thinking they're so exceptional, while computers are proving time and again that's not so. The evidence is starting us in the face.
Thanks for daring to state this unpopular opinion. I completely agree that humans have a very poor (and hence inflated) idea of what they are good at, because they have only had animals and (recently) machines to compare themselves to, plus these opinions formed long ago are a very firmly held cultural memory (e.g. literary and movie tropes, religion). Creativity being IMO one of the most badly misclaimed abilities.
*This was written with an AI, and I told it to be spicy, salty and smarmy.
It sure is!
So all new discoveries will get walled off from the GPTs and we will be stuck with constantly regurgitated old information unless you go looking in paid for publications.
Yeah what we have today is not capitalism, at least by Adam Smith's standard, and definitely not the capitalism that was practiced between the end of WW2 and Reagan.
The US desperately needs to bring their anti-trust enforcement back to the standards of the post-war era
Want money to build weapons and blow up some people outside the US? Sure no problem! Want money to recuperate from the massive investment losses your bank or company incurred due to your bad decisions? Sure no problem!
Want another $30 a month for your social security disability check to account for inflation? Nah we can’t do that!
Great bloggers, vloggers and pod casters are the new great journalists.
I shudder to think.
Once it was actually a part of the prestigious National Geographic Society, a non-profit. Now what's left of nationalgeographic.com is mostly a giant advertisement for Disney+. They even have Buzz Lightyear and Star Wars characters on there...
The [US] economy is actually fine, and all they know how to do is gut their own companies to "save" money.
If your task is to complete an exhaustive statistical survey on the issue, perhaps you're right, the comment is too vague.
If your intent is (as the parent's was) to contribute to a conversation by giving an opinion on what you observe happening to US journalism industry, with some example cases to illustrate the point, it's fine.
A non-profit that shares ownership with Disney over a crappy for-profit media network sounds more like a once-prestigious non-profit that turned sell out. Hopefully there's something good left in them, but as much as we can blame Disney for what it has become it was the National Geographic Society that let the mouse in to trash the place and their reputation.
Nothing at all to hint I'm on nationalgeographic.com
fwiw i think the deterioration has been much more clear under natgeo tv than the magazine
It was already destroyed after Fox bought it and started putting out covers with the Virgin Mary, the Real Jesus, and the Healing Value of Faith.
Once everything was 'discovered' and conglomerated into wikipedia and YouTube, there was no content left for National Geographic. They started writing articles about science news, no different than Popular Science magazine. Then the political era started, and every issue was polarizingly politicized.
I have had a subscription for decades, and I can honestly say I stopped even opening the magazine years ago. The kids just cut pictures out of it for art projects.
1,800,000 * $20
=> $36,000,000
Even so $20 per year seems impractically low. I pay ten times that for my Economist subscription. I really imagine they could strike a middle ground without losing too many subscribers.
A carload of up to 7 people is STILL only 40$. A normal cinema would be 22 ish each!! Just charge normal prices!
At the current rate, it could have like 50 full time + part-time writers on staff (let's say 90K * 50 = 4.5M - might seem low for Silicon Valley, but professional journalists and writers would jump with joy for such a gig), plus dozens of office staff (say another 2M), plus fund 24 (2 per issue) year-long big stories with like up to 100K per story (2.5M). That would be like ~10M. They could pay rent, utilities, taxes, and other expenses with the rest of 36M (or even go remote, and save even more).
You aren't going to keep the subscription base without spending a ton on marketing.
I am sure many other cost that we aren't thinking about since not in the magazine business.
To me, I am a prime example of someone who use to absolutely love magazines who could not be bothered now. There is no price that will get me to subscribe. I just don't want to be sent paper in the mail.
If you do quality work, you don't need to spend a ton on marketing. And this is very livable revenue - tons of media outlets thrived on less (inflation adjusted) back in the day.
The main problem is belonging to some conglomerate who doesn't care for such small profits or a business breaking even. They're an insect to them.
A corporation running from a non-profit dedicated to the mission (as opposed to those greedy people), or passionate private owner(s), would have no problem to continue.
Producing what National Geographic magazine does is not cheap and they have historically had much higher revenue. Nevermind that they are still continuing, just without staff writers.
Nobody said it is. But what it used to cost to run it in the times of media excess and a much larger subscriber base, is not really reflective of what it can run on and still get good stories today.
Today though photo reporting and writing is much more competitive and cheaper than it has been, even at the top. Glassdoor puts NatGeo salaries at a $65K median.
And freelancers sent on a story are paid like 20K or so for 3 weeks salary plus expenses (for Americans. Regional freelancers can usually be paid even less). That makes 5 such stories per issue at 1.2M (internal editing, processing etc is already covered by regular staff, as is more generic articles that are not in the field assignments).
>even when presented with basic numbers.
Where are those "basic numbers"?
I wonder where the money is going?
And I wonder how much a 1980s subscription cost (adjusted for inflation?)
>> The magazine was initially sold to the public as a perk for joining the society
Maybe that's not such a bad idea.
If quality of the magazine deteriorates, I will cancel my membership. If the price goes up by 20%, I don't think I'll even notice.
$20 is a lot for most families, outside of Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and a few other areas.
Economist has rich subscribers. I don't think NatGeo would be anywhere close to 1.8M with higher prices.
Personally, I'd rather fly somewhere than see photos.
Every dollar counts when you're impoverished, but I don't think National Geographic is making or breaking it based on a demographic that makes purchasing decisions at that margin.
What about suburban DC? Dallas? Houston? Denver? Salt Lake City? Chicago?
Not sure if your last sentence was intended to be ironic, but there’s nowhere you can fly that’s less than an Economist subscription
$20 around SF here is less than a couple cocktails.
I think National Geographic (which I'm a subscriber) can charge 10x more without losing 90% of it's audience. It's the price to pay to receive good articles at your home and it's definitely worth tons more than drinking and eating junk in the dark.
Looking at allegiant’s site right now the only thing I could find for that price is a flight from Provo to Vegas
I live in the Midwest. Even when I was living paycheck to paycheck in rural Minnesota, $20 per year was never a lot of money.
> Personally, I'd rather fly somewhere than see photos.
For the $200 per year I pay for The Economist I could maybe get to Chicago if I got a really good deal.
I don’t know where you’re finding such cheap flights
Lots of it must be schools and doctor and dentist offices.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/helpcenter?path=s/article...
The kinds of articles NatGeo writes are so spread across the world and really benefit from a diverse set of authors including local/regional/expert ones.
It seems to me that 100 articles on 100 different topics across the globe might be much better written by 100 different freelance authors rather than the same 19.
Regular news publications generally benefit from staff writers who have many years of experience on a particular beat. But NatGeo feels like it's on the opposite end of the spectrum, where all-freelance makes a lot of sense. It means many more voices rather than fewer.
You would think that but that hasn't really happened. The magazine had a point of view and editorial standpoint that people appreciated. What you are suggesting is basically what we get from digital outlets today.
A magazine which fires all its writers is not looking for quality, it's looking to cut costs.
Meet audiences where they are on platforms, with different stories… presumably different from what it’s known for?
Sounds a lot like flushing the remainder of the brand down the same mass-market toilet as everything else, or wanting to dump the whole “property” but not wanting to give up on the last dying gasping pennies of revenue.
Which other business fired their employees and outsourced their work to become better? Approximately, or even absolutely, none.
The magazine was eventually surpassed for profits and attention by the society’s video operations, including its flagship National Geographic cable channel and Nat Geo Wild, a channel focused on animals. While they produced documentaries equal in quality to the magazine’s rigorous reporting, the channels — managed by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox — also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like “Sharks vs. Tunas” at odds with the society’s original high-minded vision."
What a trajectory for our civilization. Reminds me of the tidbit that Astronaut used to be the most named profession teens aspired to in the 70s and 80s. Now it's influencers. And don't call me old or jaded, I'm barely 30, I already grew up with ancient aliens on the 'history' channel.
That which starts well ends badly.
That which starts badly ends worse.
Why did they need a VP of DEI for such a small workforce (that they've now laid off entirely)? Seems like some poor decision making internally.
Zero COGS == infinite margins!
I’m sure they’ll figure out how to build a sustainable business put of that. /s
1) They had 1.8 million subscribers when deciding to shut down. Each subscription cost around $40, so you're looking at $70 million+ in revenue, from the magazine alone. How much does a full time of editors, photographers, reporters, and more actually cost? With many failing industries it increasingly feels like the burden is not coming from operational costs themselves, but from these enormous administrative layers which essentially just drown businesses, yet are the last to see major cuts. If you can [apparently] barely afford to fund your editors, photographers, and more - where exactly should DEI rank on your list of concerns, let alone expenditures?
2) Changes in themes tend to push people away from businesses. I actually had to check the Wiki [1] to make sure I wasn't have some sort of false memory. I wasn't: National Geographic was always an overtly anti-political magazine. For instance it was able to inspire awe about the progress being made during the space race, while sidestepping the fact it was also driving mass militarization. Or give interesting and fun cultural insights across the Iron Curtain of the "enemy" during the Cold War, without at all getting involved in the political dehumanization games of the past (and especially the present).
Now? [2] 'Elephants are in trouble and we're to blame.' 'These Native Americans were taken rom their families as children' 'Kosovo wants to decide its future - but will history hold it back?' 'This scientist analyzes African American's past to inform the present.' 'This ordinary woman hid Anne Frank.' And of course a super-sized serving of focus on typical concerns such as global warming. And I'm not cherry picking. These are literally the headline articles for just this month!? This is how you lose your readers. People don't want to be preached or lectured to about your values, or why they're the worst, most undeserving living 'things' on this planet.
I expect the National Geographic, as many of us remember it, likely died long ago. And that probably happened when the business started being bounced from one mega-corp to another.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic#Articles
I'm sorry, but if you manage to find offense in those topics and consider them too political and preachy, it's 100% a you problem. What exactly is political there more than an article about Chernobyl criticising the Soviet regime's incompetence and trying to lie was? Anne Frank is political and preachy? Or Kosovo's history and attempts at state building? Unless the article about African American's past says that everything wrong is the fault of XYZ living today, how is it preachy or lecturing? And honestly, you lost me at climate change. If you think that's a political topic, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem and are a massive part of it. Which is of course unfortunate because you consider it political preaching to try to educate you about it, and are thus immune to learning better.
The new times where in some countries any topic, including wide ones such as public health or the climate, are "political" and automatically partisan is extremely annoying.
I think what you'll find, up until fairly recently, is that the covers are full of exotic topics that by and large you probably have no clue whatsoever about. If you're the curious sort, they probably make you want to crack open those pages just to see what's going on. And I think that is what many of us really remember about National Geographic. They were taking you exploring in places and parts of the world you'd have no idea about, and just showing you things for no real motivation beyond showing neat things to you. It was kind of like being on the HMS Beagle, from the comfort of your couch. And that was a really awesome feeling.
The only time they ever really slipped hard into politics (at least at a fairly lengthy glance) was during WW2, and I think we can probably give them a pass there. Even during e.g. the 60s, with a raging Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and more - they managed to stay focused on discovery. But the new National Geographic seems to have shunned its past and largely turned to identity politics, with a healthy dishing of geopolitics on the sider, into their bread and butter. I don't find that offensive, I simply find it trite. And that's a really bad place to be in for a magazine that was, at one time, about inspiring wonder and awe.
Of course they're free to do such, but readers are also free to decide, "You know, this just isn't for me anymore."
When about do you think they made this shift? In my opinion, 2015, when Murdoch got ahold of a majority of the company, was the shift to identity, narrative, rhetoric. You seem to have a better grasp on their history than me, though.
And nothing deepens engagement with readers like eliminating your full time writers. Who doesn’t simply adore getting a different voice for every regurgitated AP news article?
Or maybe it was the colonialist taint that just doesn't sit right these days?
But... the world is still vast, and worth exploring. Maybe even moreso now we _think_ we know everything via Twitter etc.
International Geographic, anyone?
Of course, no business will run at a loss, unless it is the WBNA, which is kept alive by the NBA
https://medium.com/@yannickondoa/behind-the-figures-1-why-wn....
Too bad that they have gone the way of the dodo, but the writing has been on the wall for many years.
My parents got me a subscription in 1987 when I was a kid and I'm still a print edition subscriber and linked my online account to my subscription. I can read any issue online as well and print to PDF so I do that every couple of months so I have every issue from 1888 to 2023.
All the files are named well like NGM_1918_04_125.jpg
National Geographic Magazine, year 1918, 4th month (April), page 125
Yeah, it was annoying but I ran a for loop on every file in the 80GB or so to translate it to normal JPEG. It took about 24 hours and that was 10 years ago on a much older computer.
It’s been at least 5 years since I’ve done anything like that though.
Edit: You can always use dd to grab the raw data.
I have older software on 3.5" floppy disks that I can no longer access, and fortunately have the disk images.
Not sure I'd trust my only copy of something I want to keep long term to a "usually."
What file format were the issues/articles?
PDF?
Something else?
If the dodo genome had been torrented it would be alive today.
too soon man, too soon
I’d never seen the image on the Internet at that point. I guess it might have been published there, but viewing it in high resolution print would have been way more impressive than an SVGA CRT or whatever I was using then.
It’s sad, I think as long as its sale was funding the fieldwork people were happy to pay. But make it into a normal for profit magazine and it’s just another crass commercial effort without heart. And people voted with their wallets.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180926-akashinga-all-wo...
Amazon and Apple offer nearly free entertainment that they subsidize at a loss. Vertical media companies are trying to compete and are thus attempting to mimic the streaming model.
This is an unwinnable battle. Disney and NatGeo can't compete on price. HBO / Warner / Discovery can't either. They're being forced to awkwardly consolidate and cut costs to stem their losses while they try to serve the same customers.
Streaming is ultimately a game of throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. You can't charge a big premium for sludge content, especially now that it's a commodity.
Summers full of prestige drama and blockbusters have been replaced by shovelware Bird Box sequels and shows that get launched and canceled in one season.
It's disappointing.
Any media savy millennial or gen-z could build a hundred million dollar a year brand with that following alone but instead they’re posting articles about “skincare routines” and “birth control for cats” with almost zero engagement.
FYI: The long lines at the Hilary Step were because someone stopped to play Zelda on their phone.
Look at Disney, who does not make most of their content available to stream on other platforms. Their latest movies haven't been great, but compared to what they cost to make, they've absolutely bombed at the box office.
I suspect a lot of this has been because many people would rather wait a bit and let the whole family watch on disney+, rather than pay at least the cost of an entire month's worth of streaming per ticket, plus the high cost of drinks and snacks once you get in.
In my area, a family of four could easily pay $50 for tickets for a single screening. With the prices of everything going up, an $8-12 / month streaming plan on disney plus makes way more sense.
Apple TV has some other sci-fi with not great writing like “Hello, Tomorrow” but that are still fun for the visuals and what not.
I do also like For All Mankind, although its started to get a bit silly in later seasons. Season 1 is great however.
It is inspiring to see individuals succeeding on Substack - https://growthinreverse.com/archive/ It proves that people will pay for quality content and it is possible to build a successful business. If an individual can make a million dollars a year by himself, imagine what a business can do, if only they have the discipline to produce high quality content.
In the next few years, the web is going to drown in low quality AI generated content. It would be a good time for disciplined content producers who go for quality than quantity, to make a name for themselves - individuals or businesses
He's basically the only reason I subscribe...
Nothing as good as, say, 1883.
Also, ST TOS is exceptionally good. I tried watching TNG several times, and find it just unwatchable. I'm probably the only person who has polar opposite opinions of TOS and TNG.
Be that as it may, you would think that a million subscribers would be enough to keep a magazine afloat.
Like - we have a huge writer strike right now, the second very large one in recent years. Meanwhile the CEOs and shareholders of every media company are paid multiples of what every writer gets combined. It's wildly perverse. And not Apple's fault, or even Amazon's.
nat geo magazine used to have millions of loyal subscribers.
That's not even remotely true. People pay for lots of subscription services; it's getting ridiculous. And we pay a very dear price indeed for getting blasted with ads and propaganda.
> nat geo magazine used to have millions of loyal subscribers.
And then Rupert Murdoch bought them. Immediately, people knew it would get strip mined to the bone and then sold off for parts. If anything, I'm surprised it hasn't been faster and uglier.
... If the negative externalities of advertising and propaganda were costed in, the entire media landscape would be wholly different. Most people can't even imagine how different.
The problem isn't that people aren't paying for content, it's that people are the product now; even when they pay.
I love showing my kids documentaries, but even the majority of those now are a bit unbearable with over the top voiceovers, etc.
Besides, no two people are equal.
Well, that sounds like a disaster. It’s like asking the project manager to create a program by piecing together some code.
I remember getting a spam call back in the 90s. They were trying to sell magazine subscriptions. I wasn’t interested, but when asked what magazine I liked the best I responded with National Geographic. The person on the line had never heard of it. I was honestly surprised that someone had never heard of it. They said they would ask a manager if they offered that magazine and I did wait since I was curious. They did not.
Instead, enjoy the vintage National Geographic with all the splendor of excellent travel writers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Life_of_Walter_Mitt...
From eliminating defined-benefit from employee pensions schemes to "not having" any employees at all, that is the name the game.
Instead of fixed contracts where the entity carries the risk of reduced revenue, just take advantage of a willing pool of competing freelancers that race to the bottom and are at the mercy of economic cycles and their very own lifecyle.
People often rail about generic "capitalism" but this is an example of the countless levers available to tune the beast so that its less of a vampire: What type of labor contracts firms can legally engage-in is a simple political / regulatory choice.
I'm surprised there hasn't been some kind of payment aggregator for news - eg. pay some amount for articles from a number of different sources. I imagine there's some business reason that has prevented such a thing from being introduced.
In this world, instead of having an exclusive distribution deal with a single company, content creators (tv studios, journalists, sound cloud musicians, youtubers) would price their content at whatever they think it's worth, and make the viewing key available via e.g. smart contract or some other payment system and API.
Apple/Netflix/Hulu/Youtube/Popcorn Time could each have their own pricing model: ad supported, subscription based, usage based, pay as you go with a self-custody wallet. They can also distribute the content they want to carry. They can compete by reducing their hard costs for distributing the content, or by having better recommendation engines or content search, or delivering a better experience however else they like.
In this kind of world these platforms become more like interfaces to a universe of content that exists outside the walled garden. You can choose the interface you like and still have access to any content. You could use a community-supported FOSS interface that you self-fund, that kind of interface might give you access to the whole firehose, or you could subscribe to a hyper-curated Montessori-approved children's portal to content that is educational and not over-stimulating, for example. One can dream!
I used to subscribe to The Information. They had really high quality content consistently.
But then they got greedy and introduced an even more expensive plan and moved a bunch of features to that more expensive plan, and what’s left in the lower tier (but still hundreds of $$) subscription is kinda crap.
I’m not sure I want to renew my subscription this year.
But it's 99% b2b networking and sales, trying to get websites on board and then negotiating contracts, and it sounded pretty unpleasant for a technical person to pursue.
I don't know why there aren't dozens of these. I guess everybody wants to fully own the platform, and aggregation is unappealing to them. But there's a lot of money just waiting for whoever does it, and it should benefit writers a fair bit too--they'll actually be able to get paid under this scheme; and a $10/month subscription might actually be worthwhile, instead of getting only a single website as it is today
Artist don't make a living from music streaming.. They get money from live shows, swags and other performance. Steaming typically make less than 10% of what they need.
I am not sure this model would work for news.
Here was just one example:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-sc...
Instead of talking about that there is never ending jabber about supporting Content Creation (Supply). Cuz People love receiving attention much more than they are capable of doling it out (Goldharber's Attention Inequality). On top of that Broadcast tools have become cheap, distribution has become cheap, content creators a dim a dozen. So its a system with runaway Supply. Now mostly mistaking meeting sudden random huge spikes in Demand for success.
So dont ask your kids to get into content creation, unless they have infinite Trump like self promoting energies.
I'd be happier to pay for a bundle subscription than individual things. I subscribe to the Washington Post, and regularly donate to The Guardian, but for everywhere else, a full subscription just doesn't make sense for the 1-2 articles I may read a month.
And as has been discussed for more than a couple decades, people mostly aren't willing to pay the mental transaction costs for micropayments at a sustainable level.
Some of it is probably the news/magazine businesses' fault in that they opened up the floodgates for free content during dot-com. But people wouldn't have liked the alternative either which was probably draconian paywalls and lawsuits over unauthorized content access.
I guess that’s why I’m not an entrepreneur. :)
Edit: another comment named it as blendle.
Apple News?
It seems like a lot of quality paper publications wanted to get into the whole online thing and the quality didn't survive the transition. Maybe because the medium doesn't allow for it. People don't interact with websites the same way. Maybe low effort content made enough ad money that companies just shifted their attention there instead.
The latest issue: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/june-2023
Might be different in the US, considering its scope, but around here, this "buy me a coffee" type model just doesn't seem to work.
I have continued to pay for my nytimes subscription because they never stopped my student discount. I’m perfectly happy with the value nytimes gives me for 4 bucks a month. I’d not pay 10 though. But I use nytimes a lot. Any other publication dare not ask more than a buck a month.
In addition to that, we'd frequently stop by a newsstand or bookstore to pick up other periodicals if there was an article we were interested in, or if we had extra time to read that week.
The idea of halcyon days when all you needed was a single subscription is a myth. If you wanted regional news plus some pool reports from Washington, Wall Street, and somewhere in Europe, then sure, a single subscription would do. But if you liked to read several different news sources, you paid for several different news sources.
And dozens (hundreds) of other industries have been/are being consumed by the internet/computer technology. We can miss them, wish them to continue, but change is inevitable.
Instead of one article covering a school board meeting it gets split into one article per speaking, an article in cover why the meeting happened, an article on when they'll meet next, one interviewing the attendees, etc.
It's a tricky problem.
Would gladly pay $1 or do a 5 pack for $5-6 with a 1year use expiration. They usually want $5 for one article or else expire credits in a month and charge $9. Just makes no sense to me, I'll get a pay per view rental on Amazon instead with my money and be entertained for 2 full hours. (I don't have Netflix or similar.)
I really wish micro payments were a thing where I could pay $20 a month and not hit upteen paywalls and they would all get a piece of that monthly cost.
Why i don't pay for it ? Because the rest of the newspaper is filled with propaganda crap, so it is not worth it.
National geographic is this magazine writing about exotic people and places. Too bad the exotic people and places are destroyed to maximize profits.
The fall of these "journalists" will be a net good for the world.