National Geographic

• 1. Introduction

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  National Geographic began its life on the 22nd of September 1888 as a modest scholarly journal sent to 165 charter members. No one reading that first issue could have imagined what it would become: a magazine whose June 1985 cover portrait of a twelve-year-old Afghan refugee named Sharbat Gula would grow into one of the most recognized photographs in the history of print journalism. What makes that arc so strange is just how long and winding it was. The magazine spent its first years as an academic publication, then pivoted toward pictures, then helped the U.S. government in two world wars, then reinvented itself for the Cold War era, and eventually passed out of the nonprofit hands that founded it into one of the largest media empires on earth. How did a journal for 165 scholars become a global brand read by tens of millions? And what does it mean that by 2023, the company that made its name on long-form reporting laid off every last one of its staff writers?

• 2. From Scholars to Pictures

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  Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, born in 1875, became the magazine's managing editor in September 1900 and drove its transformation away from dense academic text. His champion was Alexander Graham Bell, who served as Society president and pushed for what he called "dynamical pictures" - images that conveyed a sense of motion even in a still frame. Critics on the Board of Managers resisted, viewing the many illustrations as a sign of an "unscientific" conception of geography. Grosvenor and Bell prevailed. Starting with the January 1905 issue, which published full-page pictures of Tibet taken in 1900-01, the magazine began its pivot toward visual storytelling. By 1908, more than half of its pages were photographs. Color arrived in the July 1914 issue - an Autochrome photograph of a flower garden in Ghent, Belgium, taken by Paul G. Guillumette. That same July 1914 issue also carried the first article written by a female author: Eliza R. Scidmore's account of Japan's youth, titled "Young Japan". Scidmore also contributed what became the second color photograph ever published in the magazine's pages, an image of a young Japanese boy gazing at a chicken and her newborn hatchlings. In 1915, Grosvenor began building a dedicated staff of photographers and equipping them with the most advanced darkroom tools available at the time.

• 3. The Photograph That Changed Everything

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  Steve McCurry took the portrait that would define a generation of readers in 1985, photographing Sharbat Gula - a twelve-year-old Afghan girl living in Pakistan as a refugee. Her image ran on the June 1985 cover. Her name was not even known at the time. Seventeen years later, in 2002, she was located in the mountains of Afghanistan at the age of twenty-nine, and her identity was finally confirmed. The story of that search itself became an entry in the magazine's history. Meanwhile, the photography technology behind the magazine kept shifting. Luis Marden, a writer and photographer born in 1913 who died in 2003, convinced the magazine in the mid-1930s to let photographers trade their heavy glass-plate cameras and tripods for small 35mm Leica cameras loaded with Kodachrome film. The first published use of Kodachrome film appeared in the April 1938 issue - photographs of Austrian dancers taken by Bob Moore. In 1959, the magazine placed its first photograph on the cover: a depiction of the 49-star American flag after Alaska's admission to the union, shot by B. Anthony Stewart. By the January 1962 issue, cover photos had grown to fill the entire front page. The shift to digital photography followed later, and in December 2003 the magazine ran its first all-digital article, a piece titled "The Future of Flying" photographed by Joe McNally, featuring the F/A-22 Raptor. In 2006, National Geographic launched an international photography competition with more than eighteen countries participating.

• 4. Maps, Wars, and the White House

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  National Geographic Maps - originally called the Cartographic Division - became a formal division of the National Geographic Society in 1915. The first supplement map to appear in the magazine ran in the May 1918 issue under the title "The Western Theatre of War", designed to serve as a reference for overseas military personnel and the families they had left behind. The maps grew in strategic importance beyond anything a magazine supplement might normally carry. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's White House map room was stocked with National Geographic maps during the Second World War, and the Society gave Roosevelt access to its full archive of photographs, maps, and cartographic detail to support the war effort. At the end of the war, U.S. colonels Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel used a National Geographic map to partition the Korean Peninsula along the 38th parallel. A National Geographic map of Europe, bearing Winston Churchill's markings from the Yalta Conference, is on display today in the Winston Churchill museum in London. On some occasions the Society's map archives filled in gaps when the U.S. government's own cartographic resources fell short. The first sponsored scientific expedition dates to 1890, when the Society funded geologist Dr. Israel Russell to survey and map the Mount Saint Elias region in North America. During that survey, Canada's highest peak, Mount Logan, was discovered. The first fold-out map in the magazine appeared in October 1889, depicting the Meadow Creek Mountains in Tennessee along the French Broad River to Asheville, North Carolina.

• 5. Cold War Coverage and Controversy

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  During the Cold War, the magazine made a deliberate editorial choice to present what it called a balanced view of countries behind the Iron Curtain. Articles on Berlin, de-occupied Austria, the Soviet Union, and Communist China were written to minimize politics and center culture instead. Coverage of the Space Race followed a similar line, foregrounding scientific achievement while largely setting aside the program's entanglement with nuclear arms buildup. The approach was policy, not accident. Controversies arrived anyway. The February 1982 cover digitally altered the pyramids of Giza - rearranging them so they fit the vertical frame - and the resulting scandal became a landmark moment in debates about photographic credibility in the digital age. In 1999, the magazine was drawn into the Archaeoraptor affair, publishing what it believed was a fossil linking birds to dinosaurs; the fossil turned out to be a forgery. A 2010 photography competition produced another problem when it emerged that the winning image - presented as a portrait of a dog with fighter jets overhead - had been assembled using photo-editing software by filmmaker William Lascelles. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the magazine published maps labeling the peninsula as "contested", a classification that drew criticism as contrary to standard international cartographic norms. In March 2018, editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg said publicly: "For decades, our coverage was racist." She acknowledged that the magazine had ignored non-white Americans and framed different cultures as exotic, reinforcing racial clichés.

• 6. Expeditions and the Natural World

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  Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole on the 6th of April 1909 on a Society-sponsored expedition, and the account of his accolades ran in the January 1910 issue. Twenty years later, on the 29th of November 1929, Richard E. Byrd flew over the South Pole on another Society-sponsored expedition, photographing more than 60,000 square miles of Antarctica from the air. Jacques-Yves Cousteau's first article for the magazine appeared in the October 1952 issue under the title "Fish Men Explore a New World Underwater". Jane Goodall began her chimpanzee research at Tanzania's Gombe Stream Park in 1961 with funding from National Geographic, publishing findings across the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1967, Dian Fossey started a long-term Society-funded study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Sign-language training of Koko the gorilla, funded by the Society over six years under researcher Francine Patterson, was reported in the October 1978 issue. In 2012, filmmaker James Cameron became the first person to solo-dive to the Mariana Trench, aboard a vessel called the Deepsea Challenger, as part of a joint scientific expedition supported by the Society. John Glenn carried the National Geographic Society's flag on the first U.S. orbital space flight in 1962; Apollo 11 astronauts carried that flag to the moon in 1969. Louis and Mary Leakey reported in the September 1960 issue on the discovery of Zinjanthropus, a hominid species more than 1,750,000 years old.

• 7. Ownership, Decline, and What Remains

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  At its peak in the late 1980s, National Geographic had 12 million subscribers in the United States alone, plus millions more internationally. By the time circulation figures were last publicly reported, the U.S. and international combined count stood at roughly 1.65 million as of the 30th of June 2024 - a fraction of that high-water mark. In September 2015, the National Geographic Society sold a 73% controlling stake to 21st Century Fox for $725 million. A December 2017 deal brought Disney into the picture when it announced the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, completing that purchase in March 2019. In September 2022, the magazine laid off six of its top editors. The following June, in 2023, it dismissed all of its remaining staff writers, shifting entirely to a freelance model, and announced that U.S. newsstand sales would end in 2024 - closing out a retail presence that had begun only in 1998 after more than a century of subscription-only distribution. The Russian edition was shut down in April 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine; its former publication team went on to launch an independent title called Russian Traveler. National Geographic Kids, launched in 1975 under the name National Geographic World, continued publishing separately, reaching a circulation of roughly 500,000. The magazine's Instagram page had accumulated 280 million followers - the third-highest follower count of any account not belonging to an individual celebrity. In June 2026, the National Geographic Society plans to open the National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Washington, D.C.