Science2 publishers3 min readPublished
Scientific American layoffs revive echoes of the 1986 science magazine crash
Scientific American's June 2026 sale cost 15 jobs. The count now used to place that loss in the history of science media tracks print magazine closures back to the 19th century, and a newsroom that shrinks and keeps publishing counts as a survivor.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Scientific American was sold to new owners in late June 2026, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut the salaries of many of the people who stayed.
- The sale followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and CBS News.
- Bruce Lewenstein and Mooney, both scholars of science journalism, conclude that the current alarm is partly a recurring panic and partly something new, calling the answer a mix of both.
- Popular Science, which distributed well over a million copies a month as recently as 2011, dropped print in 2021 and its digital magazine by the end of 2023, and still publishes online articles and two podcasts.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Citing eleven survivors out of 29 as evidence that newsroom science capacity is collapsing uses an instrument built for print closures. An outlet that halves its staff and keeps publishing counts as a survivor.
- contradiction The authors settle on a mix of both, and that verdict, from the scholar who diagnosed the 1986 alarm as a moral panic, sets a high bar for anyone calling the 2026 cuts new in kind.
- precedent The Popular Science route, from monthly print to online articles and podcasts, is the likeliest shape of further contraction, and a closure tally files that route under survival.
In 1986, two magazines out of roughly 17 in circulation stopped publishing [4]. That is about 12 percent of the field in a single year [4]. The count now offered for comparison is built on a different base: every prominent broad-audience popular science magazine created in the United States since the 19th century [7][8]. Eighteen of those titles have closed, ten of them before 2000 [1][2]. One figure is an annual failure rate among live titles. The other is a survival rate across the whole history of the genre.
The counting rules are stated, and they are narrow: print closures only, broad-science titles for a general readership, so a magazine devoted to astronomy alone is out, and educational, alumni and membership publications are largely excluded [8]. Bruce Lewenstein and Chris Mooney, both scholars of science journalism, call the effort preliminary [8][15].
Those rules put the cuts that prompted their essay outside the dataset. A magazine that is sold, sheds staff and keeps publishing still counts among the survivors, and a newspaper or a broadcaster was never in the 29 to begin with [6]. Eight closures since 2000 is a real pattern, 44 percent of the total from the most recent quarter-century [3].
Lewenstein's 1987 analysis of the first crash concluded that an audience did exist, though perhaps not as large as commentators and publishers had hoped [10], and that the alarm around it was a moral panic: a real concern whose scale interested parties exaggerated [11]. The decades that followed brought training programs, new outlets and new formats as the internet grew [12]. Failure was routine before that, too. McGraw-Hill launched Science Illustrated in 1946 and folded it by 1949 [17].
The language in 1986 ran hot. One commentator said, "The science magazines didn't shake out. They fell apart." [5] The general manager of one of the failed magazines said, "There was a perception that they were irrelevant." [6] Asked whether the current worry is cyclical repetition or something new and more troubling, Lewenstein and Mooney write: "The answer is a mix of both." [9]
Popular Science shows what contraction looks like when nobody folds a title. It went bimonthly, then quarterly, then dropped print in 2021, 149 years after the Popular Science Monthly of 1872 [13][5]. The two authors call it by far the starkest recent print loss [14].
Mooney worked at The Washington Post for nearly 10 years, which is one of the newsrooms whose science staffing was cut [3][2]. The count still stands, and the people best placed to notice the change are also inside it. What it tracks is print closures [8]. If the 2026 cuts differ in kind from 1986, the measurement that would show it is science and environment staffing at general-news outlets over time.
What to watch
- Whether Mooney publishes the full dataset, and whether the 29-title total holds once digital-native and single-field outlets are included.
- Any time series of science and environment reporting jobs at general-news outlets. The closure tally counts print closures instead.
- Whether Scientific American's new owners cut further or change publication cadence, the pattern Popular Science followed from 2011 onward.