Well, I suspect that the magazine Scientific American, now 121 years old, has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel. Apparently it’s been going downhill for some time, losing revenue and subscribers, and went even farther downhill content-wise under the previous editor Laura Helmuth, who decided to use the magazine as a “progressive ideological” mouthpiece (see my posts on this issue here).
Research Information (RI) and Legal Insurrection (LI) are among the several places announcing that Scientific American, until recently owned by Springer Nature, has been sold to another company because it was unprofitable (h/t Howie). There’s no announcement on the journal’s website itself, but the content looks tepid, as it has been for some time. Scientific American used to have articles on real science written by real scientists, but that pretty much stopped a lont time ago. As Wikipedia notes, the journal was founded in 1845, and:
Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Prize-winners having been featured since its inception.
This is sad, but the morbidity of the journal probably reflects waning interest in magazines and especially in popular-science journalism. The only newspaper I can think of that still has a dedicated science section is The New York Times (every Tuesday), though I may be missing some venues because I don’t read newspapers on paper. To me, another sign of this waning interest is the lack of science books in many compilations of “best books of the year,” and I don’t think that’s due to a paucity of good science books.
From RI:
Springer Nature has announced the sale of its consumer media businesses, including the science publication Scientific Americani n the United States and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
The publisher says the move forms part of a strategic decision to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education, while supporting the long-term development of the two consumer-facing brands.
According to Springer Nature, both titles are being acquired by new owners with significant consumer media expertise and the capacity to support their future growth.
Frank Vrancken Peeters, Chief Executive Officer of Springer Nature, said: “Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft are respected and loved science media brands with a long and valued history, and we are grateful to the teams who have built and sustained them. We have taken the time to ensure these strong brands find the right homes – organisations with the consumer media expertise and ambition to invest in their future.”
Springer Nature said it is working with both buyers to ensure continuity of publication throughout the transition process. Scientific American is to be acquired by LabX Media Group, a global science-focused media company; the transaction will complete on 24 June 2026.
You can read about LabXMedia group on Wikipedia or its own web page; the organization already publishes The Scientist, a trade journal for working biologists rather than a popular-science magazine.
Author Leslie Eastman at LI is not as kind to the magazine:
I have been following the antics of Scientific American, the Bud Light of science journals, for quite some time now.
The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:
- Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
- The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
- The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
- Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.
JAC: These articles of course came out under the helm of editor Laura Helmuth who, after a wild social-media rant when Trump was elected, left the magazine in 2024. On this site I documented many other wonky articles that appeared in the magazine, most of them catering to “progressive” ideology: More from Legal Insurrection:
Now comes news that Springer Nature, the publisher, announced it is divesting both of its flagship consumer science magazines, Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Spectrum of Science) in Germany. The company says that the sales are part of a strategic pivot to concentrate exclusively on its core academic, health, and education publishing business.
. . .The decline of Scientific American in both respect and profits offers a cautionary tale: when a once-venerable science publication abandons rigorous, evidence-based journalism in favor of ideological advocacy by endorsing political candidates, adopting contested social terminology, and framing sports injuries through a racial lens, it erodes the very credibility that made it indispensable to its readers.
Had the magazine’s leadership chosen to trust its audience’s intelligence and doubled down on accessible, accurate science coverage rooted in empirical reality, it would have retained the broad American readership that sustained it for nearly 180 years, rather than shrinking into a niche ideological outlet.
The sale to LabX Media Group may yet represent a second chance, but only if new ownership recognizes that scientific literacy and editorial integrity are the foundation on which a sustainable, respected science publication must be built. Based on the union drama, I fear it will be a significant challenge.
If the new owners don’t reset the publication’s priorities, they will find it harder to rebrand the product than Bud Light did.
I asked two AI bots for information about the profits and circulation of Scientific American over time.
From Claude:
Bottom line: the reliable, roughly comparable data points suggest the US print/print+digital base fell from around 550,000–650,000 in the mid-2000s to around 300,000 by 2020 — a decline of roughly 50%, consistent with the broader magazine industry’s collapse over that period.
From Grok:
Detailed standalone profit-and-loss numbers for Scientific American are not published. It was a small unit inside Springer Nature (and previously Nature Publishing Group/Holtzbrinck) and was not broken out in annual reports.
- Third-party estimates put Scientific American revenue in the ~$29.5 million range, consistent with the combined €25 million figure for both titles.
- Circulation was reported at roughly 300,000 in 2020 (about 240,000 print + digital and 22,000 digital-only). Earlier peaks were higher (around 450,000 paid subscribers mentioned in mid-2010s coverage). Print readership (including pass-along) was cited at 2.2 million in recent media kits.
- Print advertising pages and newsstand sales have declined over decades, as they have across most consumer magazines. Digital traffic and subscriptions exist but operate in a lower-margin environment than Springer Nature’s research journals.
Judging from readers’ comments, Scientific American has been lame for a long time, well before Helmuth took over. For some reason it stopped using well known scientists to write articles (or those scientists didn’t want to write for the magazine). And under Helmuth the magazine hit rock bottom because it was not only lacking good articles by good scientists, but became ideologically captured. Will LabX Media Group bring it back? I doubt it; perhaps the days of public interest in science are gone.
Doesn’t matter to me. Things go out of business. It looks like Quanta is the new Scientific American.
I cancelled my subscription to SA in 2021 or thereabouts out of disgust and followed its further decline by reading WEIT’s take on the articles that appeared later. But since Helmuth left, I haven’t heard anything outrageous about SA. That gave me hope that the new editor might have turned the ship around and that SA might be worth reading again.
If anyone here has continued reading SA, I’m curious to know your opinion. Has the magazine improved at all?
I’m not a subscriber but the current EiC Jeanna Bryner has been writing a lot of the recent content and it all seems to be focused on science not on social justice. So positive trend?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/jeanna-bryner/
El País, the Spanish newspaper, has a great science section: Materia.
I’ve been reading Scientific American since I was too young to understand most of it, at least since my early teens, and its decline has been one of the saddest nonpersonal things I can think of in my lifetime. It’s been many years since I bothered even checking to see if it had any interesting articles.
Just a quick comment to agree with María Jinich. El Pais is one of the great newspapers of the world, as good as the Guardian used to be and a lot better than it is now.
Robert Elessar posted while I was typing the above. My experience of Scientific American is exactly the same as his.
Well, that is sad. I do think that the main causes of this downward spiral is mostly because of changes in peoples’ broad interests, and changes in how people consume media. S.A. is not the only such rag that is shrinking, so its recent Wokery may not be as important as other factors. According to the Google AI, Popular Science mag is even farther down the drain, now relegated to a website and podcasts.
What remains of the popular appetite for learning about science is now well supplied by oodles of science oriented web pages that require no subscription (my home page is Science Daily), and then there are other options like YouTube. That has an algorithm where if you even briefly view something about geology, then it will push geology videos at you forever. These distractions are impossible to resist.
I have been a subscriber since 1967, when my Aunt Ethel gave me a subscription for my tenth birthday. At that time, and for many years after that, most of the articles were written by the scientists and engineers themselves—the people who were actually doing the work. For decades, I recall very little political commentary—or even political leaning.
Then the troubles started. More and more articles were written by science writers—not by scientists, but by interpreters of science. This change slowly injected politics and ideology where it didn’t belong. (Maybe science writers, like other reporters, began to think they had a license to influence events rather than simply to report them.) Then, long-tenured male columnists were dumped, and I knew that something was very wrong. All of this got started when Editor-in-Chief John Rennie left the helm and, with Laura Helmuth’s tenure, the magazine reached rock bottom.
I have to say that in the past few months, the print magazine has been much better—at least it seems so to me. This month’s issue—while written mostly by science writers—seems to be straight-up science and technology. (There’s a long series of articles on solar energy, scarily showing how far China has gone in developing the technology and selling it to the rest of the world.) All along, it seemed to me that the worst excesses at Scientific American were online, less so in the print magazine.
So, maybe the magazine is getting better, and maybe a change of ownership will make a positive difference. I hope that LabXMedia takes good care of what was once a great science magazine. I sincerely hope it’s not too late.