After 127 years, National Geographic magazine has recently sold their media assets to 21st Century Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the 20th Century Fox movie company.

Fox has owned and managed the National Geographic channel for the last twenty years, and now that the magazine has been going through a troubled period, with their magazine subscribers peeking at 12 million in the 1980’s, to 3.5 million in the United States and 3 million outside of the U.S. today, dropping by nearly six million within the last thirty years. The cause of this loss in subscribers pertains to the modern online and digital media.

In an online article by the Washington post, one of the main fears for this new ownership by company editors, writers, and chief executive of the society Gary Knell of the long running and beloved magazine stems from the content of the other Murdoch-owned media companies such as Fox News, which has been a source of controversy and bias towards people over the last ten to fifteen years, as well as the content that Fox has been running on the National Geographic channel, such as “Doomsday Preppers” being seen as the most “ridiculous” in my opinion.

What are my thoughts on the matter? Well, I remember when I was younger, I enjoyed watching the nature documentaries and seeing all the interesting and exotic places that NG would air on their station, but like other “Learning Stations” as I call them, such as The History Channel and TLC, I fell out of touch with NG and watching all these other channels because there has been an uprising of drama-centered, reality TV to promote higher cable ratings and to bring in more viewers.

While this change of content has brought in more people to watch such fascinating behavior of how these people, referring to “Doomsday Preppers”, live and act and how they deal with their plights and beliefs in the world coming to an end, such content to me doesn’t belong to a society, being NG, that based it’s reading and content on, “so that we may all know more of the world upon which we live.” -National Geographic Society. This idea to me, means expanding our horizons and seeing the lives of people and different cultures all over the world and how their society is different than ours, yet we can learn and gain an appreciation that we all have our own way of life and how we survive within the environment that is around us. Many people have production and technology, while other still live in tribes and must hunt and gather, and also still keep sacred rituals as part of their heritage and beliefs.

James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son said in an interview taken from the Washington Post, that “there were no immediate plans to change the publication.” Which to me means keeping the same ethics and types of material that the magazine has published since its beginnings.
One quote made by Knell however, which was a statement made to his staff, makes me have cold feet about the idea, he said:

Keeping the magazine while cutting costs “would be a short-term fix for a long-term set of issues.”
To me, cutting costs never works out, and also sounds similar to “lay-off” of staff and production to save money to make up for the decline in subscriptions.

Even though I have had a falling out with National Geographic due to its choice of shows and content, it’s hard for any company to keep producing the same ideas over and over, and while I enjoy watching shows about nature and seeing the exotic parts of the world, I know that under a new company, new perspectives will be involved and different content will eventually be added, especially since Fox is a profit-making company with $29 billion dollars in revenue, they are going to change the game up to keep that money rolling in, because a different attitude must take effect to make money, different from the previous National Geographic Society from the last 127 years.

Not everyone can be pleased, and there will be choices and changes made to NG magazine that many will love and many will hate, but if what Murdoch’s son says is true, and that there will be no change to the magazine, then that will stave off from alienating current staff as well as readers devoted to the magazine and its material that has kept the magazine around for so long.

I say, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, but then again…with a loss in six million subscribers, there needs to be a change somewhere. What will Fox do with the National Geographic magazine content? Only time will tell, but if the changes are poor, then that time will be short lived, and 127 years will come to a close.