“I have every confidence that it will survive this rough patch,” he said.
I have to believe he is right, and not just out of shameless sentiment or because I have relied on S&T, as it is familiarly known, over the years for straight-talk about the heavens and the gritty details about how telescopes and other gadgets by which astronomers observe the sky are made. In its singular way, S&T is treading the same dark path that many publications, including The Times, have been traveling lately.
In 1980 I left Sky & Telescope to join Discover, Time Inc.’s entry in a wave of popular-science magazines that arose in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Those were heady times for me, my colleagues and our competitors, but that wave soon crashed for lack of advertising. By the ’90s most of Discover’s competitors were gone, and many newspapers had discontinued their stand-alone science sections.
The carnage continues as the internet erodes the classic business model in which advertising pays the freight for publishers. So far this year some 2,300 media jobs have been lost, including at BuzzFeed, once a darling of digital-media mavens.
Sky & Telescope, aimed at an audience of hobbyists and armchair astronauts, was founded by Mr. Federer and his wife, Helen Spence Federer, in 1941, by combining a pair of existing publications: The Sky, published by the American Museum of Natural History, and The Telescope, out of Harvard College Observatory. “We’ve never missed an issue, and don’t intend to,” Mr. Tyson, who has edited the magazine since 2014, told me.
Many of the articles in Sky & Telescope are written by professional astronomers and so bear a stamp of authority. My editor, Joseph Ashbrook, who had a Ph.D. from Harvard, treated each word in every issue as a reflection of his own professional probity. A mistake, real or perceived, in my copy could transform him into a sputtering tower of frustration, after which he would retreat to his office and run my story through his typewriter, while I sat outside at my own desk listening for the clatter of his keys.
Later in my career, the fact that I had worked at Sky & Telescope often gave me credibility with older astronomers still uneasy about the mainstream media. It is the kind of magazine that readers hoard for eternity in giant stacks in the attic, selling and trading back issues.
Except for a couple of years in the early 2000s, Sky & Telescope has always been profitable, and it remains so, Mr. Tyson said. The company has expanded to publish Night Sky magazine for beginners, books, star atlases and other products, and to run eclipse and other adventure tours. In December 2020, the magazine is offering a 23-day eclipse cruise around South America and Antarctica with the astronaut John Grunsfeld, who helped repair the Hubble Telescope in 2009.
