When two popular science magazines – out of about 17 in circulation – ceased publication in the same year, one commentator said, “The science magazines didn’t shake out. They fell apart.” The general manager of one of the failed magazines said, “There was a perception that they were irrelevant.” One of the publishers remembered being in a “state of shock” as the failures emerged.
The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a “science boom” in the media industry was now dubbed a “science crash.” Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science “was a fad.”
