I do sympathise with Nautilus and want them to succeed. But I am a freelancer who has not been paid by them for eight months now. A longform piece takes weeks to write. Interviewees gave their time so generously to me. And I was ridiculously excited to write for a publication I respected so much.
I had no idea that nautilus were still commissioning features when they knew they had no guaranteed income stream to pay their writers.
When nautilus ran into serious financial trouble they did not publish many of the articles they had commissioned, mine included - this meant that they would only have to offer a much smaller kill fee for these unpublished pieces. I am waiting for this fee (and am aware of several others writers in this situation). But we didn't know the pieces would never be published. We were never told. Instead the promised nautilus issue emerged that day, we told our friends, we scanned the pages with genuine excitement, and our features were absolutely nowhere to be seen.
Emails to the editor (naive, perfectly friendly emails) went unanswered for weeks.
I actually honestly wouldn't have minded as much if they were up front last year and said look, we just don't have the money, we messed up, we're sorry. They're a publication I truly want to survive regardless of my input.
But I'm a freelancer and that promised money was going to see me through Christmas. They should not have been actively commissioning when they did not have the means to pay. It was also really humiliating to email them for weeks to ask where our articles had gone. Why not reply honestly to us at the outset?
Christmas came and went. I couldn't afford presents for my family. I lost the chance to submit elsewhere because it was a time-sensitive piece. I had to apologise to my interviewees who I bet won't be so generous with their time the next time a writer approaches them. They've been burnt, too.
And even now (in the last week) nautilus have told me they're about to merge with AAAS and so we'll all get paid. But it's clear from the Undark piece that this is not true.
Sometimes magazines run into problems. I get that. I feel bad about it. But then don't commission pieces when you know there's no money to pay freelancers whose livelihoods depend on each and every word they write. We actually get paid by the word! Don't humiliate writers by making them beg for checks for weeks of work. And don't promise a merger is imminent with a big science institution when that big science institution will deny it. Good on Undark for this piece. And congratulations to the many fantastic science magazines who do the industry proud.
One of the problems is that they're shipping dead trees. No way is this economically sustainable these days. They should have gone all digital and raised their prices long ago.
Let's do some math - how many subscribers do they need to break even if they pare down staff, go all digital, and raise their price a bit? Hand-wavy numbers for minimal viable staffing, but should be order of magnitude correct:
$1,400,000 annual burn rate assuming a minimal staff to run just the online magazine and dump print (I acknowledge they have other expenses, but let's ignore them for now)
If you charge $60 for an annual subscription - very reasonable for the content - they would need 23333.33 subscribers to break even.
They got $1.2 million last year in grants, some $9.5 million in funding since 2012. If they can't manage to attract 24K subscribers with that kind of funding they don't deserve to stay in business no matter how good their content is.
I love their content, but they need somebody who knows how to run a business to be in charge.
This may be the most Hacker News comment I've ever seen.
There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print.
Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve.
At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable.
Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.
You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.
After seeing this, I was reminded I forgot and let my sub lapse.
I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door.
I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60).
Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.
But look, there's a bigger problem here. Maybe they can't get 34k subscribers because it's hard to get people to cough up $60 a year, have all their subscription data resold yadda yadda.
You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality.
This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.
There is no way I would pay anywhere close to 120$ per year for a digital magazine. The magazine is a beautifully printed with amazing illustrations on premium paper. Looking at them on a tiny screen would suck.
Indeed, I got a lifetime digital subscription when they offered them. They probably shouldn't have made it lifetime, they should have made it 3 years or something reasonably generous instead of outrageously generous.
You can't charge that for a digital version though. This is one of the very problems. The perception would be that they are simply competing with every other free blog out there filled with content.
I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.
You are exactly right. This seems like the kind of thing we they need to run more linear with their growth instead the normal "just get traction and monetize later" plan. The big challenge is what if you can never get the monetization to work then your burn just kills you and you have to shut it down. Additionally for journalism, there is no mega corp to come along and buy your users up to bail you out.
This is a real shame. Nautilus is without a doubt the most consistently interesting and high-quality publication I read. I have just renewed my Prime membership, and hope others do the same. (Or that they get the investment they need and deserve.)
I did the same a few weeks ago, but mostly because I realized "I read a lot of Nautilus articles through HN, and every one has been excellent."
A subscription isn't that expensive, and part of making the world you want to live in (one with greater scientific literacy) is putting your money where your mouth is...
After enjoying the articles linked to from here for years I finally subscribed to their print version. Will probably also subscribe to The Atlantic, since I've been enjoying the articles there linked from HN as well.
> Or that they get the investment they need and deserve.
From what is said in the article, they are getting the investment that they need, but things are moving slowly. I don't know how true that is, but I want to believe.
I used to be a subscriber to Nautilus and initially loved their work. Over time however I've drifted away primarily because I've come to feel a lot of their articles are popularisations of the the sort of low quality "science" you see regularly make its way to HN (before getting ripped apart in the comments). Specifically, articles based on non-reproducible, low N, p-hacked studies from fields like psychology, social science, neuroscience, etc.
As the replication crisis wreaks havoc and meta-studies continue to reveal major structural issues with work in these fields, I just can't bring myself to read Nautilus anymore.
Most of the comments here are positive (from my limited reading, I like Nautilus too, no affiliation). I'm just curious - can you give a few examples of the articles you didn't like?
>Steele, a former television journalist, started Nautilus in 2012 with a two-year, $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based philanthropy that describes itself as targeting the world’s “big questions” in science, religion, and philosophy. That money, supplemented with an additional $2.1 million from Templeton, was the main funding source for Nautilus in the run-up to publication, and during its first two years in print. But the Templeton Foundation typically reduces support for startup ventures after the first three years, and, accordingly, it has dialed back funding for Nautilus, although it gave the magazine an additional $1.25 million in 2015, and a little more than $1.2 million last year.
Another business wholly dependent on investor patronage.
We need to examine how we can continue to crowdsource legitimate cultural and creative endeavors. It seems that we're backpedaling to a medieval system, where science and art could only be done when bankrolled by a wealthy patron, whom the scientist/artist would have to accommodate if they expected the patronage to continue. [The dependence on corporate sponsors is really a form of this too, and as paying subscribers have evaporated, these have become ever-more-crucial.]
Stringent copyright regimes have only brought us heavily sanitized, commercialized, vacuous media. I would argue loosening this would benefit most small writers and publishers. At the very least, limiting copyright terms and keeping some culturally relevant icons in the public domain would be a huge boon. For example, imagine if someone besides Disney could benefit commercially from the Star Wars franchise, which was originally released 40 years ago. Isn't that long enough for its creators to have had exclusive control?
Something like a web-based micropayment service that dispensed monies based on time spent reading/enjoying would be useful, but it's hard to get everyone on board. I know there have been a couple of HN'ers who've made a pass at it, but to this point, nothing has stuck.
Just canceled my NYT membership and subscribed to the print edition of Nautilus. A few months ago I went to the NYT homepage and every top article had "Trump" somewhere in the title. I have a threshold for how much political blather I can stand, and Nautilus is like a breath of fresh air from that.
As much as I can't stand it either, Trump is the president of the US, and making a lot of waves. It's not surprising that he is dominating the news, and it's not just "political blather".
I had already taken out a subscription a few days ago after reading the Cormac McCarthy piece. My immediate reaction was to cancel my subscription and explain why (I have been a freelance teacher in the past and had to chivvy for payment) but I am now thinking it over.
Perhaps we should monitor the quality of the articles closely.
> started Nautilus in 2012 with a two-year, $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation
That's very interesting and important. I know the Templeton Foundation as funders of 'research' into creationism. Richard Dawkins, for example, is apparently a critic of theirs and refused to participate in a project of theirs. The Templeton Foundation's Wikipedia page tells some other interesting stories with names you may recognize (with the caveat that it is Wikipedia).
I wonder what influence they have on Nautilus. It's a genuine question; the world isn't black and white, Templeton is not evil, and I don't know their current level of funding for Nautilus - perhaps they could use more Templeton money. OTOH, funders can have subtle influence in many ways, from story selection to self-censorship.
EDIT: Oops, should have kept reading to answer one of my questions: "[The Templeton Foundation] has dialed back funding for Nautilus, although it gave the magazine an additional $1.25 million in 2015, and a little more than $1.2 million last year"
Its been a long time since i've subscribed to a magazine but I have always enjoyed reading Nautilus articles. $29 for print and digital is a steal for the quality of content they produce.
I used to work in the "content generation" sphere. There are two tangible things that humans love to generate for free, art and writing. These things on their own are almost always monetarily worthless even if their worth to society is huge. The reason is that most people, like us here on this board, willingly produce creative writing for free.
The only money in content is advertising since humans need some coaxing to produce it. This is resulting in companies that focus on content being controlled by advertisers behind the scenes. These days it's simple to get "paid placement" almost anywhere with zero mention that the content is sponsored.
This also explains why the best articles seem to come out of companies that don't sell writing. Google employees and the like are putting out research and case studies for fun, labors of love.
At the time of writing this, a subscription for one year is 30$ for a bi-monthly magazine. I would love it if it was once a month (for double the price), however, shipping to Europe seems to cost another 30$ per year. I understand the cost of international shipping and will consider it, but at first glance it sounds a bit steep. There's also no student discount, which is also understandable but a pity.
That said, I do love reading their pieces and it makes me sad that they're in financial trouble.
Note: I read the content online now, but would greatly prefer paper. I subscribe to the Economist and a national opinion magazine. A digital subscription is just not my style (for now, who knows what the future will bring..).
To all writers and editors: keep up the good work. Quality publication. Hope to hear more about the AAAS deal!
Yep. I feel the same about both paper and EU shipping. I would currently have subscriptions to a good 5 English-language magazines that I currently don't have subscriptions to, because the shipping surcharge makes the price unreasonable.
I really hope that this is some obscure tangle that, when solved, will really help some of these publications prosper and make some happy readers here on the continent.
I'm a lapsed Nautilus subscriber and in my opinion the world doesn't need a "Paris Review for science" (what I liken Nautilus to) as much as it needs a "BuzzFeed for science" or even a "USA Today for science. That is, reach and impact should be much higher priorities than prestige and design awards.
Thanks for posting this story, I loved reading Nautilus articles. Today I've decided to do something about supporting them - I have purchased their Prime Membership.
That's sad to hear. Has to be my favorite publication. I subscribe to the digital edition, and, while visiting Los Angeles, bought a print copy at Barnes & Noble. I did ask whether they carry older issues and unfortunately the answer was no.
The sole comment as of 11:26AM PDT, April 29th, 2017, is devastating. It suggests that science journalism is fucked. I'm going to poll a few friends that do freelance work for Nature & Science to see if this is the general consensus.
Here's the comment for anyone who's curious, posted by "Adam" on "04.29.2017 @1:19 PM" (I'm guessing EDT):
> Science journalism is basically dead as a thing. Many of the top publications pay late or not at all. The rates for freelancers is consistently low and the expectations are high and getting higher. Other than a very small number of high performers, this is not a job and the best that most can expect is to be scraping by as a freelancer. Understandably, many simply stop doing it.
This explains their recent uptick in requests for donations. I bought a print+digital subscription a few weeks ago because emails from Nautilus have been the ones that I've most looked forward to lately.
Am I being cynical or is this just an ad? Every other person is cancelling their subscription to NYT from a piece that went up yesterday, and now this shows up on the front page of HN the day after?
I just subscribed. It's one of my favorite mags I read all the time and I was introduced to it by HN. Had no idea they were struggling. I hope more subscribe and I hope it survives.
Computers accelerate information exchange, and so much of capitalism is based on the latter. This means huge rewards for those who aim at the popular taste...but the popular taste is very much the lowest common denominator of our cultural data sets. And while it's entirely right to aim at that, our accelerated capitalist system does not do so well with steadily financing things which aim above that. This might be because economic models pursue equilibria of supply and demand, but just as there is a lowest common denominator of both there is also a highest common factor of which economic models take no account, and therefore under-finance.
[+] [-] Freelancer2017|9 years ago|reply
I had no idea that nautilus were still commissioning features when they knew they had no guaranteed income stream to pay their writers.
When nautilus ran into serious financial trouble they did not publish many of the articles they had commissioned, mine included - this meant that they would only have to offer a much smaller kill fee for these unpublished pieces. I am waiting for this fee (and am aware of several others writers in this situation). But we didn't know the pieces would never be published. We were never told. Instead the promised nautilus issue emerged that day, we told our friends, we scanned the pages with genuine excitement, and our features were absolutely nowhere to be seen.
Emails to the editor (naive, perfectly friendly emails) went unanswered for weeks.
I actually honestly wouldn't have minded as much if they were up front last year and said look, we just don't have the money, we messed up, we're sorry. They're a publication I truly want to survive regardless of my input.
But I'm a freelancer and that promised money was going to see me through Christmas. They should not have been actively commissioning when they did not have the means to pay. It was also really humiliating to email them for weeks to ask where our articles had gone. Why not reply honestly to us at the outset?
Christmas came and went. I couldn't afford presents for my family. I lost the chance to submit elsewhere because it was a time-sensitive piece. I had to apologise to my interviewees who I bet won't be so generous with their time the next time a writer approaches them. They've been burnt, too.
And even now (in the last week) nautilus have told me they're about to merge with AAAS and so we'll all get paid. But it's clear from the Undark piece that this is not true.
Sometimes magazines run into problems. I get that. I feel bad about it. But then don't commission pieces when you know there's no money to pay freelancers whose livelihoods depend on each and every word they write. We actually get paid by the word! Don't humiliate writers by making them beg for checks for weeks of work. And don't promise a merger is imminent with a big science institution when that big science institution will deny it. Good on Undark for this piece. And congratulations to the many fantastic science magazines who do the industry proud.
[+] [-] programd|9 years ago|reply
Let's do some math - how many subscribers do they need to break even if they pare down staff, go all digital, and raise their price a bit? Hand-wavy numbers for minimal viable staffing, but should be order of magnitude correct:
$1,400,000 annual burn rate assuming a minimal staff to run just the online magazine and dump print (I acknowledge they have other expenses, but let's ignore them for now)If you charge $60 for an annual subscription - very reasonable for the content - they would need 23333.33 subscribers to break even.
They got $1.2 million last year in grants, some $9.5 million in funding since 2012. If they can't manage to attract 24K subscribers with that kind of funding they don't deserve to stay in business no matter how good their content is.
I love their content, but they need somebody who knows how to run a business to be in charge.
[+] [-] jonstokes|9 years ago|reply
There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print.
Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve.
At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable.
Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.
You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.
[+] [-] ingenuous2|9 years ago|reply
I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door.
I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60).
Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply
You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality.
This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.
[+] [-] yread|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarycrusader|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|9 years ago|reply
I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.
[+] [-] snarf21|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbro|9 years ago|reply
A subscription isn't that expensive, and part of making the world you want to live in (one with greater scientific literacy) is putting your money where your mouth is...
[+] [-] cs702|9 years ago|reply
FWIW, you can also donate at: http://www.nautilusthink.org/donate
[+] [-] ajmurmann|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ori_b|9 years ago|reply
From what is said in the article, they are getting the investment that they need, but things are moving slowly. I don't know how true that is, but I want to believe.
[+] [-] RBerenguel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsainsbury|9 years ago|reply
As the replication crisis wreaks havoc and meta-studies continue to reveal major structural issues with work in these fields, I just can't bring myself to read Nautilus anymore.
[+] [-] vijayr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
Another business wholly dependent on investor patronage.
We need to examine how we can continue to crowdsource legitimate cultural and creative endeavors. It seems that we're backpedaling to a medieval system, where science and art could only be done when bankrolled by a wealthy patron, whom the scientist/artist would have to accommodate if they expected the patronage to continue. [The dependence on corporate sponsors is really a form of this too, and as paying subscribers have evaporated, these have become ever-more-crucial.]
Stringent copyright regimes have only brought us heavily sanitized, commercialized, vacuous media. I would argue loosening this would benefit most small writers and publishers. At the very least, limiting copyright terms and keeping some culturally relevant icons in the public domain would be a huge boon. For example, imagine if someone besides Disney could benefit commercially from the Star Wars franchise, which was originally released 40 years ago. Isn't that long enough for its creators to have had exclusive control?
Something like a web-based micropayment service that dispensed monies based on time spent reading/enjoying would be useful, but it's hard to get everyone on board. I know there have been a couple of HN'ers who've made a pass at it, but to this point, nothing has stuck.
[+] [-] acjohnson55|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsharlet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewvc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps we should monitor the quality of the articles closely.
[+] [-] self_assembly|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
That's very interesting and important. I know the Templeton Foundation as funders of 'research' into creationism. Richard Dawkins, for example, is apparently a critic of theirs and refused to participate in a project of theirs. The Templeton Foundation's Wikipedia page tells some other interesting stories with names you may recognize (with the caveat that it is Wikipedia).
I wonder what influence they have on Nautilus. It's a genuine question; the world isn't black and white, Templeton is not evil, and I don't know their current level of funding for Nautilus - perhaps they could use more Templeton money. OTOH, funders can have subtle influence in many ways, from story selection to self-censorship.
EDIT: Oops, should have kept reading to answer one of my questions: "[The Templeton Foundation] has dialed back funding for Nautilus, although it gave the magazine an additional $1.25 million in 2015, and a little more than $1.2 million last year"
[+] [-] DIVx0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slackingoff2017|9 years ago|reply
The only money in content is advertising since humans need some coaxing to produce it. This is resulting in companies that focus on content being controlled by advertisers behind the scenes. These days it's simple to get "paid placement" almost anywhere with zero mention that the content is sponsored.
This also explains why the best articles seem to come out of companies that don't sell writing. Google employees and the like are putting out research and case studies for fun, labors of love.
[+] [-] itcrowd|9 years ago|reply
That said, I do love reading their pieces and it makes me sad that they're in financial trouble.
Note: I read the content online now, but would greatly prefer paper. I subscribe to the Economist and a national opinion magazine. A digital subscription is just not my style (for now, who knows what the future will bring..).
To all writers and editors: keep up the good work. Quality publication. Hope to hear more about the AAAS deal!
[+] [-] m_fayer|9 years ago|reply
I really hope that this is some obscure tangle that, when solved, will really help some of these publications prosper and make some happy readers here on the continent.
[+] [-] mavhc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|9 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencenews.org/about-science-news
[+] [-] rvijapurapu|9 years ago|reply
I wish more of us can do the same.
[+] [-] sandis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apathy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyphase|9 years ago|reply
> Science journalism is basically dead as a thing. Many of the top publications pay late or not at all. The rates for freelancers is consistently low and the expectations are high and getting higher. Other than a very small number of high performers, this is not a job and the best that most can expect is to be scraping by as a freelancer. Understandably, many simply stop doing it.
[+] [-] faitswulff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielhooper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r721|9 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/robinhenig/status/858347023308910596
https://twitter.com/mslopatto/status/858354324425949184
https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/858309371612286976
[+] [-] qwert-e|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jerry2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply