Another fallen soldier…

From the ScienceInsider blog comes the truly depressing news that The Scientist will be no more. They quote CEO Vitek Tracz with an utterly unsurprising explanation:

The only reason is economic – we simply could not find a way to make it pay. There is no other reason. It has wonderful and talented staff, an audience that likes it, and it succeeded in keeping high editorial and production standards for many years. The world is turning away from traditional magazines, and our dependence on page advertising brought us to this point.

One of the toughest aspects of working at Seed was that feeling of watching disaster unfold in slow motion, as the magazine gradually fell apart in spite of all the incredibly talented and motivated writers and editors who were struggling to keep it alive. A lot of it came down to an ongoing series of bad business decisions by the company as a whole – which I won’t get into – but a lot of it also simply boiled down to the harsh realities of publishing. But the audience was certainly there… and enthusiastic, to boot. If I had a dime for every person who told me, “Oh, Seed? I loved that magazine!”…? Depressing.

But this is the reality now – I’m very lucky that I manage to find regular work and sustain myself as a freelancer, even as the number of mainstream outlets for science writing continues to dwindle steadily and rapidly. It’s sad to go to Barnes & Noble and see that the ‘Science’ section in the periodicals pretty much consists of Scientific American and National Geographic and Sky News (for the astronomy geeks), possibly New Scientist, and… Cat Fancy.

Wired, of course, being a “technology” magazine, enjoys much much more company in a different section, and as such, appears to be doing just fine thank you very much. So at least there’s that. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a brighter future as new web- and iPad- and other device-oriented news platforms emerge (especially since it’s clear I’ll never survive as a full-time blogger!), but in the meantime, it probably wouldn’t hurt to start updating my resume…

UPDATE (18 Oct): Looks like the Old Boy got a reprieveLabX, a company that runs what appears to be a Craigslist for lab equipment (minus, hopefully, the ‘Casual Encounters’) and publishes LabManager magazine, has acquired The Scientist and apparently intends to keep publishing the magazine with editorial staff intact. Seems like an odd fit to me, but apparently they will keep things rolling along as they are without any obvious disruption, so I’ll just take the good news wherever I can get it…

Comments are closed.