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.