That was the douchey thing to do. There are still 2000 -180 + people that still work there to support family, homes, cars, etc. These people, and trust me, these people are as liberal and smart as they get. You just chipped away at their lively hoods and a more or less secure future. If you REALLY want to hurt the Murdoch clan go out and VOTE to rid this country of their supporters grip. Canceling a single magazine subscription isn’t going to hurt Murdoch in the least. I’d be willing to bet that even if he loses all of Nat Geo he still wouldn’t be hurting. The only ones who would be hurting are the people on your same team. And you just cut them a little…
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In every company some/many/most of the employees are decent. This shouldn’t be a reason to stop voting with feet when the management sucks.
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True.
But from an archival standpoint, this doesn’t bode well for anyone. The economics are broken.
Definitely the end of an era. Nat Geo had some of the best photographers in the world under it’s banner–the people who could actually look at a scene, snap the image, and print it. Goodbye, bulwark of photographic excellence, you’ll be missed.
Yes, actually. I’d expect him to have a shred of honesty in which he upheld and expanded NatGeo’s 100+ years of traditionally excellent photography and reportage, instead of gutting it like any other shitheel corporate raider.
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When the magazine et al starts cranking out climate change denials, flat earth conspiracies, catfish noodling awards and Benghazi exposes … by ALL means all should vote with feet!
What do you mean from an “archival standpoint”?
So did I (cancel). Agree–hope lots of people do the same. Sad day.
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Print is a necessity for the long-term archivability of cultural and scientific information—crucial things for a technological civilization (and arguably, any civilization). The web is nice, but it remains more a messaging system than anything made for the long-term.
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Ok, I see what you are saying.
What’s broken then, is digital archiving. Perhaps that’s where the focus should be.
Does need too many specialised tools. There’s a reason why microfiche is still an often used medium for long-term archival.
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Economics can permit many things to supersede any inherent value (like tulips, for an extreme example). But the problem of digital archiving already has a fully functional, robust, technological solution at hand: print.
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I don’t think so.
There are 170+ who are now unemployed, most of whom are gifted journalists, photographers, and graphics designers. As I come from a family of journalists, I know that many who are left are young and less experienced than those Murdoch chose to let go.
I think it’s “douchey” to continue to subscribe to a publication when you can’t be certain that you’re getting reliable and factual information.
But by all means, continue that subscription of yours.
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Almost all magazines start off digital. Converting to print, then sticking that issue in a warehouse or scanning it for storage digitally or on film is sub-optimal as well. You lose a lot of fidelity and it takes a lot of work to turn it back into data that can be searched or otherwise processed.
A much nicer solution would be to store the original data digitally (in an open format, of course) and if you want a piece of paper to stick in a warehouse, go ahead and print one out.
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Starting next month, a new series:
November:
TUNISIA: Beachcombers paradise or terrorist breeding ground?
December:
MALAYSIA: Beachcombers paradise or terrorist breeding ground?
January:
MOROCCO: Beachcombers paradise or terrorist breeding ground?
February:
GREECE: Beachcombers paradise or terrorist breeding ground?
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Maybe we’re thinking about two different long-terms here. I mean the 100+ years type with suboptimal storage conditions, a full digital archive needs maintanance and supervision - most important is the regular copying (bit rot et al) and recoding for newer computer systems,
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A warehouse full of paper isn’t maintenance free either.
The library of congress consists of about ten terabytes of data. That’s about $325 worth of storage.
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We’re back at the starting point: Your non-redundant JBOD is not a useful place for long-term storage. A tunnel full of boxes with microfiches can be read without more complex tools than a magnifying glass in 100 years with little information loss.
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I wouldn’t argue with you if paper were the dominant medium, but it isn’t anymore. The digital archiving problem needs to be solved. Printing it out isn’t a reasonable solution.
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Hello! I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn!
I guess a library could be described as a warehouse. But with lots of redundancy.
This doesn’t actually solve the problem I mention above. We already do this to some extent because it’s convenient, not because we intend the archive a printed version for the long term in an accessible manner.
You appear to want there to be a technological solution for something which doesn’t need another solution or doesn’t actually solve the problem I’m talking about. Could there be a short-term solution cobbled together in this fashion? Sure. I mean, I guess. The short term sometimes doesn’t even work all that well for computers. Look at the After Dark screensaver. Computers look to me more and more like performance art than lasting art, like going to a play. You can read about it afterwords, but if you didn’t have access to After Dark when it first came out, someone would have to explain it to you or you’d have to catch a reboot or reissue—and even those things aren’t the same thing as the initial release.
If you don’t have a deep, permanent archive with some good redundancy built in, like a library with access to printed matter, you may be putting whole tracts of culture and science at risk of erosion.
What does dominance have to do with permanence?
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