National Geographic
History

The first issue of the National Geographic Magazine was published on September 22, 1888, nine months after the Society was founded. In the first issue, Gardiner Greene Hubbard writes,

The "National Geographic Society" has been organized to "increase and defuse geographic knowledge", and the publication of a Magazine has been determined upon as one means accomplishing these purposes.

It was initially a scholarly journal sent to 165 charter members; in 2010, it reached the hands of 40 million people each month. Starting with its January 1905 publication of several full-page pictures of Tibet in 1900–01, the magazine began to transition from being a text-oriented publication to featuring extensive pictorial content. By 1908 more than half of the magazine's pages were photographs. The June 1985 cover portrait of a 12-year-old Afghan girl Sharbat Gula, shot by photographer Steve McCurry, became one of the magazine's most recognizable images.

National Geographic Kids, the children's version of the magazine, was launched in 1975 under the name National Geographic World.

At its peak in the late 1980s, the magazine had 12 million subscribers in the United States, and millions more outside of the U.S.

In the late 1990s, the magazine began publishing The Complete National Geographic, an electronic collection of every past issue of the magazine. It was then sued over copyright of the magazine as a collective work in Greenberg v. National Geographic and other cases, and temporarily withdrew the compilation. The magazine eventually prevailed in the dispute, and in July 2009 resumed publishing all past issues through December 2008. More recent issues were later added to the collection; the archive and electronic edition of the magazine are available online to the magazine's subscribers.

In September 2015, the National Geographic Society moved the magazine to a new owner, National Geographic Partners, giving 21st Century Fox a 73% controlling interest in exchange for $725 million. In December 2017, a deal was announced for Disney to acquire 21st Century Fox, including the controlling interest in National Geographic Partners. The acquisition was completed in March 2019. NG Media publishing unit was operationally transferred into Disney Publishing Worldwide.

In September 2022, the magazine laid off six of its top editors. In June 2023, the magazine laid off all of its staff writers, shifting to an entirely freelance-based writing model, and announced that beginning in 2024 it would no longer offer newsstand purchases.
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