Rupert Murdoch invests $725 million in National Geographic

[Syt]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/national-geographic-is-going-for-profit.html

National Geographic Magazine Will Now Be Mostly Owned by Rupert Murdoch

National Geographic, the nonprofit magazine famous for its yellow-framed cover and eye-opening photography, announced that it is going for-profit after 127 years. The change — an expanded version of an existing 18-year relationship involving properties like the National Geographic Channel —  is a partnership between Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society.

The new entity will be called National Geographic Partners: Murdoch's entertainment company will own a 73 percent stake in it after a $725 million deal that will increase the National Geographic Society's endowment to nearly $1 billion; the Society — which says on its website that it "has been inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888" and is "one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions in the world" — will own the remaining 27 percent, according to a report in Variety. The Society will remain a nonprofit.

Rupert Murdoch also owns The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News Channel.

Gary Knell, president of the National Geographic Society and the first chairman of the National Geographic Partners board, said after the announcement that "the Society's work will be the engine that feeds our content creation efforts, enabling us to share that work with even larger audiences and achieve more impact. It's a virtuous cycle." Knell also told the Washington Post that he saw the new deal as an opportunity to give the magazine a "longer runway" after years of trying to figure out the problems of shrinking advertising and subscriber bases; he also said there were no plans to change the magazine as of yet.

The board governing all National Geographic properties — which together reach an estimated 700 million people per month — will be composed of an equal number of Society and Fox representatives. The profits from the partnership will be shared by Fox and the Society.

The deal will also transfer ownership of "National Geographic Studios; related digital and social media platforms; books; maps; children's media; and ancillary activities, including travel, location-based entertainment, archival sales, catalog, licensing and ecommerce businesses" to National Geographic Partners.

[The Brain]

National Geographic? Surely Murdoch knows that you can see boobs on the internet now?

[Tonitrus]

Ah well, NG had a good run.

[Eddie Teach]

My grandfather used to collect them.

[11B4V]

I have a sub with them. The daughter reads the shirt out of them.

[Pedrito]

I have a subscription to the american edition.
It's still a very nice magazine; too bad that, to reduce costs, they ceased to attach to the magazine those wonderful, wonderful maps they used to publish at least once every two months in the nineties.
In the last issue there's a really good story about a group of climbers trying for the summit of an almost unheard of peak in southeast Asia.
Interesting read for mountaineering lovers like AR.

L.

[Syt]

I used to read the German edition when it first debuted. Unfortunately, these days the ratio of long, in depth articles vs. short one paragraph fluff has moved sharply in the favor of fluff.

[Admiral Yi]

Ah well, NG had a good run.

Doesn't look like the core operation is going to change.  Just more commercialization of ancillary operations like guided tours and such.

[Syt]

[Neil]

I cancelled my subscription this year.  It had been a long time coming.  National Geographic had been falling off a cliff for years now, and I finally realized that I could get great photographs of far-off places on reddit.

It seems like there'll be a commitment to getting worse, so I guess it was a good move.