Wednesday News Day: National Geographic Lays Off Staff Writers

This one is kind’a important to me. My timing when making life changes, like changes in careers, has been… problematic. When I left my accidental 15-year career at the phone company to become a pubic school teacher, the county where I live had just declared bankruptcy, tremendously reducing my chances of getting a teaching job in that county. Twenty years later, when I got laid off from teaching at Full Sail University, I revisited why I hadn’t gone into journalism when I got my degree in 1991 and couldn’t recall why, except the notion that maybe I’m not aggressive enough to be a journalist… Of course when I started re-exploring the possibilities of reconnecting with journalism, the profession was going through a profound slump with local newspapers disappearing. So, I put in another nine-years teaching.

Now that I’m at the end of that 28-year journey it really feels like it’s now or never whether I add professional journalist to my resume. Not too surprising, things in the journalist job market are not great. When I first moved to Las Vegas in 2016 I befriended a journalist who worked for the Review-Journal and shared my second thoughts about not going into journalism in the 1990s and he quipped that I had dodged a bullet.

This video (above) is one that I shared with my middle school media students. They didn’t get it and didn’t really care. Playing games and trolling each other on their phones was their preoccupation and the disappearance of print or even TV news was of no importance to them. That they don’t care is concerning, but then I certainly didn’t know the value of anything when I was in middle school, so I can only hope that they live long enough to figure it out for themselves. Attempting to teach media and journalism to self-absorbed eleven and twelve year olds was frustrating but certainly not a reason for me to abandon my interest in journalism.

But then when I heard a couple weeks ago that National Geographic was letting go of all of it’s staff writers and was going to go on with a few editors and freelance writers I was shocked, a little sad and a little confused about my yearly subscription to the National Geographic Society. A spokesman for National Geographic told media outlets:

National Geographic will continue to publish a monthly magazine that is dedicated to exceptional multi-platform storytelling with cultural impact. Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms. Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect.

How exactly does a media institution let go of its writing staff and maintain its excellence in producing written content? I get that the mechanical requirements of producing print media is gone and most likely has been steadily cut back over the last forty-years. But this is not that. This is an adjustment due to changes in how we consume our media. For example, I’ve maintained my subscription but stopped getting the print magazine over ten-years ago. But the reality is, even though it’s available on my iPad, I rarely log in and open the tablet version of the magazine. For all of my concern about the future of Journalism, I’ve never been a good consumer in the traditional sense. At the same time, while doing research for this article I discovered that there are podcasts produced by National Geographic. I had no idea. I’ll track those down because podcasts are my information conduit of choice. The question is whether the podcasts, IF they continue, will tell compelling stories or reveal diminishing expertise and quality.

As I continue to reach out to various information/journalism organizations for potential employment I’ve included in my cover letters the following ideas:

The world is changing and our potential audiences are changing and if we intend to communicate and provide instruction and assistance, we have to meet them where they are at. That’s the power of online communication. Technology is a force multiplier. I cannot replace us, but it can empower us to share on levels, in detail and in modes never thought possible. But someone, someone with a story worth telling, needs to be at the keyboard.

R.I.P. the historic National Geographic publication.