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You might call it a scientific experiment.
One hundred and thirty-five years after its launch, Science is going from print-centric to digital-first. The new normal at the leading journal of scientific news and research and its sister publications, all products of American Association for the Advancement of Science, will be interactive graphics and lively embedded videos. A fourth publication launches in February: an online-only magazine called Science Advances. Being born of the digital age, it will serve as a laboratory for new techniques that can be polished and then integrated into the magazine and journals. Much of this is spearheaded by Rob Covey, the digital media officer, who, starting in 2007, successfully led a similar digital transition at National Geographic.
Alan Leshner, CEO of AAAS and executive publisher, said that AAAS has had to integrate three separate non-communicating teams into one for more streamlined publishing. The print version of Science went through a redesign and soon will relaunch online with more multimedia communication, more interactivity, and easier navigation. Science Advances, which is already accepting submissions, will be an open-access journal. Scientists can submit text-only papers but are encouraged to bring in multimedia elements.
But all these changes required new skillsets–which led to the recent firing of four staffers at Science, sparking a backlash that illustrates how painful this transformation is, even if it’s necessary to remain viable as a 21st-century magazine. Science, which has a worldwide readership of one million people in print and online, is fighting to be a publication that a new generation of science enthusiasts sees as relevant and exciting, not a relic that is past its peak. The backlash also raises questions about when, if ever, journalists should “go public” with internal discord–whether putting complaints in the public realm is effective in building a better news organization.
The four employees were let go the week of September 22, two from the art department and two from production. Surprised that the terminations were not acknowledged officially by leadership–word spread among colleagues informally–the news team reportedly wrote a joint letter to management on September 26 that expressed concern over how the matter was handled. That same evening, Leshner reportedly emailed staff and, while he did not go into details, put the terminations in context of the larger digital transformation, saying that they were necessary to put the magazine into the “multimedia landscape of the future.”
Believing this to be insufficient, longtime contributor Michael Balter wrote an open letter on October 6 that protested the terminations–and especially the lack of communication about it to the staff. He declared that as a protest, he would take a three-month leave of absence. In the past year, he wrote, “we have gone from a culture appropriate to a nonprofit, membership organization like the AAAS, to the culture more typical of a Manhattan publisher or a Wall Street corporation–a culture in which even long-time, loyal employees are expendable and can be let go with essentially no notice.”
Balter readily acknowledges that his leave of absence was meant as a symbolic act of conscience, but, he told me, he felt the need to do something. He is one of the longest-serving contributors, and he could afford to take a three-month leave. (At the time of his letter, he had already completed the minimum contributions for the year required in his annual contract.) Still, some other employees were “violently opposed” to him going public, Balter said. A small number were supportive and “probably a lot were in the middle and not sure what to think.”
In a follow-up post, Balter noted that Leshner ended up meeting with about 40 staff members on October 9 at the AAAS’ headquarters to discuss the terminations and other changes. And a couple weeks later, editor Marcia McNutt and Covey met with news staff to clarify the future vision of the magazine. Balter believes that his actions, as well as the news staff’s collective letter, helped to prompt these steps.
On October 28, Balter emailed an update to colleagues: He would return to work on November 28, a month earlier than anticipated. Although the public leave was intended as a gesture, the fact that leadership met with staff to discuss the changes seemed telling. “I feel that I have accomplished all that I could expect to with my protest,” he wrote in the email. Balter told me that the meetings over the last month had some colleagues changing their minds about the worth of his open letter. He also said it sparked “extremely interesting” debates among the staff about the magazine and its culture.
Leshner said he could not comment on personnel matters or Balter’s letter, but he did say that “in order to make (the publication’s digital-first transformation) happen, we have to have a staff that thinks that way, either by retraining people or seeking out different skill sets that we need.” He added that the staff has been “a large part” of planning for Science‘s transformation and figuring out what its new needs will be. That’s a lot of people: Of the 400 employees of AAAS, about half are involved in the publications.
“Everybody is unhappy when some of those changes are personnel changes,” Leshner said. “Sometimes they have to be made, but no one does it easily. I can tell you that we have long-established protocols in place so that, by anyone’s standard, we do everything we possibly can” to transition staff, rather than lay them off. “Some people don’t want to be retrained. A lot of people like what they do, and can do it well elsewhere.”
Balter said that staff has a lot of loyalty to AAAS, which is respectful of writers and traditionally collegial. That’s part of why there was some internal pushback to his open letter, at least before it seemed to net results.
“Even people who argued with me at the beginning see the point that the primary responsibility of a journalist cannot be to protect the organization they work for,” Balter said. “Every day we talk to sources who are putting their jobs on the line–talking to us off the record and without attribution. Even in Science, we do write criticism about our own studies … It would be inconsistent for us to say, oh, when it’s AAAS, we should keep quiet.”
In transitioning to a new magazine model, Science‘s challenges are familiar, especially to other legacy publications. Its stance, though, as a product of the nonprofit AAAS is somewhat unique–its reward for good work is not financial, as it only covers its costs. But at the same time, it doesn’t have the luxury of extra money to invest in new resources.
“We think of ourselves as one of the best publications in the world,” Leshner said. “So we have to be on the cutting edge of publishing, just as we have to be on the cutting edge of science.” It would be especially retrogressive for this particular publication to not take full advantage of technology so that it can make science journalism and research more accessible to more people. And indeed, nonprofit status “gives us both the opportunity and obligation to make sure we’re doing everything we can to advance scientific education.”
But at the same time, Leshner feels a responsibility toward what should not change: the publication’s values and high standards. “As we make the transformation, we don’t want to be a lesser journal,” he said. “If we do something that doesn’t make (the publications) better, than we’ll change it.”
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