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.
Was one of two newspapers (the other being NYTimes) that wrote an article on Yvonne Barr (of Epstein-Barr) after my book Cancer Virus Hunters came out
Down here in woke NZ the main Sunday paper has started publishing 4 articles each week reporting mainly on Ph D research and primarily science (of the sort that Prof Coyne would approve of). Good initiative by our 8 universities
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.
Mark, I agree about so much being available free now. An example is Phillip Prince, a local (Va Tech phd) geologist who regularly puts up educational you tube videos on the geology of the Appalachian Mountains, doubled down on explaining the extreme flooding from Tropical Storm Helene within a week or so of its occurring, and just this week did a great video on the Nepal debris flow. And it is all at the “general reader” level – just like SciAm always was.
I read SciAm as far back as I can remember as my father subscribed in the 1950’s and I was able to use the articles for reports as early as 4th or 5th grade of elementary school. And as Jerry said, they were excellent science articles by real scientists! But sometime in the following two decades that started to change and fewer articles were by real research scientists. I taught high school physics and math in the early 70’s and subscribed our high school library to SciAm and Physics Today for the kids. The articles were good for them (and me) because they generally followed a format of intro education to the area, the research being done and its importance, future work.
But that changed at some point, with articles by science writers…articles that were a sort of wish list about what science might be done and what that might mean…they never seemed to say what was actually being done…maybe these guys didn’t know? In any case I dropped my subscription around 1990 I think. I looked at it on the newstand once in a while after that, but it just seemed to get more shallow until it really went off the rails with Helmuth – becoming Dogma American.
I just watched a video on Colonial Williamsburg’s troubles with its summer family visitors dropping 50% since its peak in the 80’s. They said it was due in part to less history being taught in school so less demand for the fam to shlep around through 18th century buildings…don’t know. Still plenty of STEM being taught and SciAm had for many years filled a niche between simple newspaper articles and research journal articles. I am glad to have been alive to enjoy it in its heyday.
Growing up, my father had a huge stack of S.A. going back to the early 1950’s so well before I was born. It was amazing. Mostly over my head, but I would pour thru them over and over.
I still remember a regular section called The Amateur Scientist, explaining how one could do various experiments, and even build rather technical instruments. Days long gone by.
And Martin Gardner’s column. My parents had old copies of SA with his column at the back.
I subscribed to SciAm in the 70s and 80s and would read each issue cover to cover. I learned a lot back then. Sad to hear of its fall into the dank pit of wokeness, where scientific objectivity, facts and logic are simply tools of oppressive trans-blak-indigiphobic Nazi-adjacent Zionist white supremacy, or something.
I visited Colonial Williamsburg last November and found it well-attended by both families and school groups, so I am surprised that numbers are down compared to the 80s. Perhaps it would’ve been too crowded to enjoy back then!
Yes, Mike, it was really crowded, particularly in the Summer in those days, uncomfortably so for us locals when taking visiting friends and family through. Your visit in the Fall was a more relaxed time and winter, other than christmas time even quieter. Glad you had a good visit.
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. And there’s an interesting, and timely, article about the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope and its unlikely provenance.
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.
Gosh. Thanks norman. As you might read in my missive above, I Had given up, but will go up to news stand today.
Let us know what you think. It’s volume 335, number 2. The cover article is Collision Course, and it’s about how low-Earth orbit is so dangerously crowded.
I hope you’re right. Optimism is not my strong suit, and I doubt that I’ll improve along that axis, but still, it may be worth paying attention and checking out recent issues.
I think they realized they’d better concentrate on science and not ideology after Laura Helmuth left. But I guess the downward spiral of subscriptions and viewers didn’t stop.
An interesting study would be: when and why did readers cancel magazine subscriptions? I remember exactly why I canceled TIME and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. Why did subscribers of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN cancel, as in the comnent above? With a big sample, maybe clear patterns emerge.
I’m sure that Sci Am, like all magazines, closely followed their subscription numbers, and could easily correlate any drop-offs to the content. Also, when you call to cancel a subscription, they always ask you, “Why?” So if any large numbers of cancellers cited the woke content, they would have known that. Either not very many people complained about the inclusion of ‘woke science’ (a contradiction in terms) or Helmuth cared more about social justice than profit.
Of course, Helmuth isn’t the owner, so she couldn’t have had the final word. The fact nobody reined her in until the shit hit the fan with her appalling tweets makes me think that they were in agreement with her.
I paused my comment to refresh my memory about those tweets, and learned that this was Helmuth’s response to her critics: “The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself.” So it’s pretty obvious that she thought she was in the moral right to ‘bend’ SA from communicating truth to serving social justice, profits be damned. Lies can’t serve the cause of ‘social’ justice any more than they can serve the cause of justice in a court of law. But if you have to tell somebody that, there’s no point.
Leslie Eastman might wantvto pull their head out of their ass on AGW
One common thread throughout these comments is how many of us started reading SA in our early teens in the 60’s and 70s, if not before. I was always a big fan of the biochemistry and astronomy articles. Good memories.
Now I get my science here, through YouTube and from podcasts.
“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”
You support this position?
No, of course not, but what a rude and intrusive question. Read the civility rules.
And who is “you” to whom you address this question?
I was just quoting an article; I didn’t say I supported all that was in it, for crying out loud.
Thank you for the clarification. It was not intended to be rude.
You (Dr. Coyne) often put in your own parenthetical remarks to emphasis your own position on statements in an article and there was none here on a position I did not think you hold. It isn’t deeper than that.
The “you” was you (Dr. Coyne) and any other commentors, as any reactions could be very informative.
I’ll bite: Colluded is too strong a word. Try this: the media and activists have normalized “climate emergency” language. Just as they have done across an array of politicized topics, they use language that is hyperbolic, far overdone, oftentimes disconnected from facts, and frequently counterproductive—unless your goal is to get clicks, votes, and donations.
My favorites are probably “trans genocide” and “existential threat to our democracy.” While these should rightly get eye-rolls, the media-fanned hysteria wasn’t funny when people wrapped repurposed T-shirts around their faces and shut down schools for over a year in our “follow the Science” states. Seemingly much in our country must now go to knee-jerk extremes. Excess is one of our few bipartisan activities.
As to the climate “emergency,” we have been living through nearly forty years of “We only have ten years left” language. The apocalyptic, end-times date setters don’t inspire confidence. Having failed to scare the kids into compliance, perhaps it’s time to try another way.
If we can’t persuade others, sure, we can call that an existential threat to “our” democracy. But here’s another idea. Adults can tackle difficult problems the way mature adults generally have: with seriousness, resolve, and calm—and a willingness to acknowledge when they were wrong.
I just finished reading The Apocalyptic Style in Woke Thinking in the Atlantic. The author observed:
He points out that most of the climate change activists have pivoted to Gaza – and use the same extremist framing. I don’t agree with everything Chait says about Israel, but he’s on point about woke.
I’ll have to disagree here. Climate change is a serious problem, it’s not “alarmism.”
I’m shocked that any readers of WEIT disagree with this. It’s as bad as saying evolution isn’t true in my view.
I blame all the skepticism on the various “experts” I’ve seen on TV here proclaiming that the Great Barrier Reef is virtually dead and cannot ever recover (it now has the greatest coral coverage ever recorded), that eastern Australia is in a state of permanent drought (we’ve had exceptionally rainy years and floods since then), that we have “only 5 years” to prevent global catastrophe (that was 10 years ago), and the UN chief saying we are in an age of “global boiling” (where I live we just had an unusually chilly winter), etc. You can cry wolf only so many times before people stop listening.
💯
If it’s true that “most of the climate change activists have pivoted to Gaza” it’s a sign of how fickle they are, and not an indication that climate change isn’t happening. Perhaps they prefer to promote antisemitism rather than save the world.
I don’t think she was saying that climate change is not an issue. Her comment was about those who, in a fickle, frenzied manner, switch from one topic to another.
This response is to frau katze
Thank you much for the link! Perhaps Chait can next tell us why so many who are not intolerant Manichean alarmists have allowed themselves to be browbeaten, silenced, and co-opted by those who are.
Comment by Greg Mayer
The NY Times, unfortunately, got rid of its Tuesday Science section back when I had a paper subscription. They still, of course, have articles about science, but no longer have a dedicated weekly section in the actual paper.
GCM
“I doubt it; perhaps the days of public interest in science are gone.”
Or in anything of substance, for that matter. When I ride the train to/from the city several days a week, I note that about 90-95% of the riders are staring at their phones, looking at nonsense. Not too long ago, they were reading the paper, magazines, books, or just enjoying the scenery.
We are turning into a society of addled mushheads….
How do you know they’re looking at nonsense? Right now, I’m reading this on my iPhone.
When I was 12 back in 1974, I would literally tremble with anticipation at the arrival of the month’s Scientific American magazine in the mail. My dad gave up on insisting on reading it first himself and he gave it to me first. That wonderful science magazine is not what it used to be.
Someone should note that the argument that “earth’s climate has been in constant change since forever” is, unfortunately, the conservative rationale for not regulating the pollution that is demonstrably altering climate. This is not a left-wing canard, it’s a well-established fact. And it’s putting stress on a lot of nature from trees to tundra.
If “birth parent” is being used to distinguish from adoptive parent, then it makes biological sense. Otherwise, I don’t know what it might mean.
I continue to find some value in the math and cosmology articles. I can’t comment on articles I’m not interested in and don’t read.
“Birth parent” replaces the old-fashioned word “mother.” Mustn’t offend trans men who have babies (aka “seahorse dads.”)
https://www.proud2bparents.co.uk/blogs/ryan-seahorse-dad
It’s also used in stories about adoption. Birth parent as opposed to adoptive parent.
It is of course ridiculous to use it as synonymous with “mother.”
Yes; I was replying to Erika, who wondered what other meaning it might have.
Claude’s note of, “a decline of roughly 50%, consistent with the broader magazine industry’s collapse over that period.” is telling, and indicates that Legal Insurrection’s conclusion that, “it would have retained the broad American readership that sustained it for nearly 180 years, rather than shrinking into a niche ideological outlet” may not be true. SciAm may have lost the readership anyway, though Helmuth’s reign at the helm certainly didn’t help, at least with those of us who grew up with the magazine.
This will date me. I was greatly influenced as a child by Glenn T. Seaborg’s article in Sciam “The Transuranic Elements”. For many years, I collect Scientific American. That is all distant history now. These days, WEIT (and others) are far more informative.
Not necessarily true.
A recent issue of Atlantic Magazine, ironically a long read in actual english words, features the decline in reading of any kind. Mostly in favor of online blogs, youtube short videos, tiktok, instagram and social media. Print magazines, arriving by mail, are struggling and sometimes just vanishing. Where reading still exists, it takes the form of internet-language -abbreviations, code words, emojis. If your idea won’t fit in a tweet, it’s not worth explaining.
Two quibbles:
1. The New York Times still has a regular Tuesday science section, although they diluted it by half to include a health section.
2. I don’t know Legal Insurrection’s politics, but it is accepting a standard right-wing climate change denial trope when it says that “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.”
Also, people have been enthusing about past articles written by real scientists. I know about two of them, one by Dick Lewontin and one by John Maynard Smith. Both expressed their views but Dick told me you turn in your article, are paid, and then they have rights to change it any way they want. And they did: the distinctive tones of both of these fine scientists were reduced to bland SciAm prose. No inaccuracies were introduced, but their vivid prose was flattened. So they were never as great as people think.
None of which makes excuses for other recent misdeeds.
I mentioned the New York Times; didn’t you read that, Joe?
I was reacting to the comment by Greg Mayer that you forwarded.
I subscribed to New Scientist for several years, but it went downhill even faster than Scientific American.
I used to like Scientific American, and also Scientific American Mind, but I stopped buying both ages ago.
I had one of their opinion pieces quoted at me yesterday as ‘evidence’ that there are more than two sexes When I responded by sharing Colin Wright’s paper on the sex binary they told me that I shouldn’t believe stuff from someone who was right wing member of two hate groups that promote racism 🤦🏻♀️. I don’t know Colin personally, but I would guess that is libel.
I gave the usual “science is true no matter who says it” response, but of course it made no difference. 🙄
When they realize they are in a losing position, people like that always play the man, not the ball.
That’s a good response. Another one is “is it possible for someone to say that sex is binary without you thunking that they must be right-wing purveyors of racism motivated by hate”?
She listed a bunch of things that she said your sex is defined by and it included genitals. So I asked if that meant that John Wayne Bobbitt had changed sex twice. Did he become a woman when his penis was cut off, and then a man again when he had it sewn back on. 😈
Of course I got no response to that. I disengaged as you can lead a TRA to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.
Another former SA subscriber here. I started reading my father’s stack of old SAs back in the 1960s. (I was particularly interested in the ads from New Departure bearings, showing what life was going to be like in the 1980s-2000s, predictions that were either way under or way over what actually happened).
I got my own subscription when I was in grad school and read it regularly for 30+ years, but somewhere around 2018 just let it lapse. (I think this was before they entered their woke period.) The local library has print copies on the shelf – maybe I’ll take a quick look.
The prospects for other titles published by Springer Nature are not good either — the journals from the Nature publishing group are being converted to DEI-promoting outlets:
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-engage-with-nature
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-i-cut-ties-with-sciences-top-publisher
They are still highly profitable, but eventually DEI will run them into ground.