The Astronomical Society of the Toms River Area
ASTRA club message board

FYI...

To our loyal subscribers and other supporters:

As many of you have heard, F+W Media, which owns Sky & Telescope, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 10, 2019.

I want to reassure you that, during our parent company's restructuring process, Sky & Telescope will continue to publish. It's business-as-usual with our magazine, website, products, and tours as we seek a qualified buyer for our brand. Our expectation is that we'll be bought by a new owner in the next few months, without major disruption to the magazine or other elements of our business.

In the meantime, I ask for your patience and understanding as we work our way through this involved process. Please know that I and the rest of the staff have every confidence that Sky & Telescope will emerge from this restructuring not only intact but better equipped to serve you in our shared passion for astronomy. We are committed to preserving S&T's legacy well into the future.

As always, thank you for your loyal support. It means more to us now than ever.

Sincerely,
Peter Tyson
Editor in chief
Sky & Telescope

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Joe Stieber
http://sjastro.org/

Aw jeez

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Interdum taurus est victor

Chris S.

Some financial info on F&W from Forbes.

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Joe Stieber
http://sjastro.org/

IMO a good deal of the blame for Sky and Telescope magazine's financial woes belongs to NASA. They've been expanding their domain into providing astronomy hobbyists with news, information, and entertainment for some time now and it keeps getting worse. Do they not have a selfish motive for this? Like trying to control the way we think and what to believe so that they can get more support from the taxpayer. It's time they leave us alone. Down with NASA. Let independent astronomy magazines provide hobbyists with news, information, and entertainment.

By the way, the same is happening in Great Britain where the government's British Broadcasting Company has started a magazine to go against the venerable "Astronomy Now" periodical. See https://blog.feedspot.com/astronomy_magazines/

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Matthew M.

I don’t think we know that S&T itself was having any particular financial woes, beyond what most paper publications are having due to the ongoing loss of paper subscribers in this day and age of broad electronic information exchange. S&T is just one cog in the much larger wheel of F&W media, and it’s the latter that’s filing for bankruptcy. Besides the general decline of paper subscriptions, F&W apparently suffered greatly from mismanagement in their attempt to establish e-commerce.

So, it’s unlikely that any free information from NASA was a significant factor in the decline of F&W. Indeed, NASA was probably a major source of news and data that S&T would weave into its articles.

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Joe Stieber
http://sjastro.org/

The information is not free and the costs can be very high with the bureaucracy that tends to exist in large government organizations. Federal taxpayers foot the bill.

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Matthew M.

Perhaps it would have been better phrased as “freely available” information from NASA, as well as a multitude of other sources. Regardless, NASA had little impact on F&W’s problems. That still appears to be the result of market conditions (people bailing out on paper subscriptions to magazines in general) as well as management ineptitude. We don’t really know if S&T itself was operating soundly, or did it just happen to be on a larger sinking ship? Hopefully, S&T is relatively sound and will be sold into a viable situation.

And it’s not that I’m a big fan of NASA. In fact, as long as they keep talking about the “zero-g” environment in the space station when they really mean “weightless,” I’ll be irked. A chance to educate about mass, gravity and weight, and they choose the sexier term over accuracy. It’s right up there with the “supermoon” drivel.

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Joe Stieber
http://sjastro.org/

American Astronomical Society to Acquire Sky and Telescope

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Ameri ... e_999.html

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Interdum taurus est victor

Chris S.