
Award-Winning Nautilus Enters Rough Waters - r721
https://undark.org/2017/04/29/award-winning-nautilus-enters-rough-waters/
======
Freelancer2017
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only have to offer a much smaller kill fee for these unpublished pieces.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.

------
programd
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:

    
    
      $ 600,000 Freelancers, $5K per article, 20 articles/issue, 6 issues/year
      $ 200,000 2 editorial
      $ 100,000 1 marketing person, online marketing savvy
      $ 100,000 2 support staff (clerical, PA, etc)
      $ 200,000 2 management/fundraising/operations staff
      $ 100,000 1 webmaster/IT person
      $ 100,000 outsourced services (HR, payroll, website hosting, etc)
    

$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
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.

~~~
Spooky23
Great point. I've always been puzzled about how advertisers get any ROI
online. I'm a very heavy internet user on a variety of topical areas, and my
lifetime value for a content site is zero. Exceptions are NY Times, my local
paper and Gartner, where either my employer or I pay for the content.

I rarely click on ads. I've probably been a successful ad conversion less than
a dozen times since 1996.

Print is different. Getting ads is a significant reason for having a newspaper
subscription. Many magazine ads are both more useful and more effective than
the ad units that you se online. I probably made a Nikon/Canon decision based
on a combination of print ads.

~~~
ggrochow
Also, some of the print ads in nautilus aren't that bad. I've actually stopped
and taken some extra time to think about a few. Less about what the ads trying
to sell me, but the ad itself raises an interesting question.

------
dkh
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.)

~~~
cs702
I just subscribed, and hope they do whatever it will take to fix their
operations-and-author-mismanagement issues.

FWIW, you can also donate at:
[http://www.nautilusthink.org/donate](http://www.nautilusthink.org/donate)

~~~
nemild
One thing that's a bit weird is that the donate link is not over SSL (and it
says Powered by Stripe).

~~~
mattkrause
Perhaps it's changed, but right now that page just collects your donation
amount and redirects you to an (SSL-protected) paypal page where you provide
the actual payment details.

I suppose the first page might leak the amount of your donation, but nothing
that's _very_ sensitive.

------
nsainsbury
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.

~~~
vijayr
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?

------
cookiecaper
> _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.

~~~
acjohnson55
There should be a physical graveyard devoted enterprises that have attempted
to solve this problem. I agree with you, but I'm not holding my breath.

------
Xcelerate
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.

~~~
dsharlet
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".

~~~
js2
The Economist provides a pretty good mix. I subscribe to it, the NYT, and the
New Yorker. I probably won't renew my NYT subscription as I find myself
reading it much less often since I picked up The Economist subscription.

What I'd really like though is to support one or two major publications and
then have a slush fund where I could pay per article to other sources.

I don't know... does HN have enough readership where it could collect funds
and redistribute? It's my primary source of reading random material.

~~~
fovc
Check out Blendle.com. I haven't used them much recently, but I enjoyed paying
for quality journalism per article. There is (or was) an HN sign up promo
somewhere

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't think this for-article model is a good one. It turns journalism into
piecework, and while there's the opportunity to strike gold and get lucky with
a particularly timely or well-received piece, it also tends to prioritize
quantity over quality because the former yields more predictable rewards.

~~~
js2
Hmmm. Publications have always had a mix of both subscriptions and newsstand
sales. Pay per article is just a more granular version of that.

Unfortunately I can't afford all the different publications that might have an
interesting article from time to time, but it seems like it would be their
loss if they completely paywalled everything off.

Maybe something more like gym memberships would work where you could purchase
say a 10-article "punchcard" or a subscription.

~~~
mattkrause
It might be too granular.

One of the things I like about print magazines (and newspapers) is the
serendipity--you read something that wouldn't normally grab your attention
because it's on the next page and...you've already paid for it, after all.

Paying per article seems like it would push people only to read things that
they're _sure_ they'll enjoy (based on the author, title, etc).

~~~
js2
True, but I already have more than I can read. You could always let readers
make the decision to pay after reading, with maybe a reasonable limit.

~~~
mattkrause
I do too, but...here I am.

I wonder if an opt-out payment scheme would work: you authorize the site to
bill you up to (say) $5/month. When you finish reading an article, the site
deducts $0.25 from your account _unless_ you take some simple action. If your
account is empty, you read for free until the next month, and maybe some
"proud support/well read" flair or something.

It does put a limit on the site's monthly revenue, but perhaps ensuring that
readers feel like they're getting what they paid for helps make up for that.

------
andrewvc
I just signed up for Nautilus prime after reading this.
[http://shop.nautil.us](http://shop.nautil.us)

~~~
keithpeter
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.

------
hackuser
> 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"

------
DIVx0
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.

------
slackingoff2017
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.

------
itcrowd
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!

~~~
mavhc
Why isn't there a company that will print and deliver locally?

~~~
chki
The demand is probably too low, especially if you consider that Europe is
itself quite big which means producing in some central country like Germany
will only reduce the international shipping costs but not eliminate them.

------
subpixel
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.

~~~
js2
Science News has been published since 1922. The print edition is bi-weekly.

[https://www.sciencenews.org/about-science-
news](https://www.sciencenews.org/about-science-news)

------
rvijapurapu
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.

I wish more of us can do the same.

------
sandis
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.

------
chis
Just subscribed. 14$ a year seems way too cheap, but maybe they've run some
numbers on it

------
apathy
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.

~~~
Cyphase
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.

------
faitswulff
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.

------
danielhooper
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?

~~~
qwert-e
What NYT piece are you referring to?

~~~
thesumofall
I guess: [http://www.businessinsider.de/bret-stephens-new-york-
times-c...](http://www.businessinsider.de/bret-stephens-new-york-times-
climate-change-article-subscriptions-canceled-op-ed-2017-4?r=US&IR=T)

~~~
qwert-e
I saw one person who claims to have cancelled their subscription. The rest of
the embedded tweets are either threatening to cancel or justifying "why they
cancelled" (before the op-ed). Makes you wonder who these furiously cancelling
people are and whether Business Insider bothered to reach them for comment.

------
Jerry2
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.

------
anigbrowl
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.

------
johnnydoe9
Just recently discovered Nautilus and it is really high quality stuff, I think
I'll get a premium membership too after reading the Cormac McCarthy issue.

------
zajd
Love Nautilus, it's a shame they aren't doing well. Wonder what their
subscriber count is.

~~~
qubex
Whatever it is, it isn't enough.

~~~
okreallywtf
Lets see what we can do about that! I think I've heard their name but I don't
know anyone that subscribes but I'm interested now, my guess is with the vast
amounts of stuff to read out there its hard for quality to shine entirely on
its own. Especially when clickbait is so much more appealing to some people. I
think it has become more clear to people that quality journalism (science and
otherwise) is not going to be free so the glut of free media might be
subsiding some (I know I pay for a lot more media than I ever used to). I'll
subscribe and hawk it on my various social media outlets.

------
Heliosmaster
If only their printed version wasn't so expensive here in Europe for the
shipping...

------
danielparks
Does the print edition contain ads?

~~~
danielparks
Nautilus customer service: “Not commercial ads, but it does feature a few
science organizations or sponsors.”

------
Animats
The current issue is headed "Consciousness". Groan. That's been discussed to
death in the AI community, with little result.

------
xor1
I would love to know more about the person behind and responsible for screwing
over the writers.

------
literallycancer
Great, maybe now we can some content that is not funded by a religious lobby,
for a change?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation#Cont...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation#Controversies)

------
bpodgursky
Whew. From the title, I thought I was going to lose my file browser.

