New Scientist

• 1. Introduction

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  New Scientist hit newsstands for the first time on the 22nd of November 1956, priced at one shilling. Three men were behind it: Tom Margerison, Max Raison, and Nicholas Harrison. That first issue asked a pointed question about nuclear power in the United Kingdom, in an article titled "Where next from Calder Hall?" That choice of opening subject was not accidental. It set the tone for a publication that would spend decades examining where science is heading, not just where it has been.

  For nearly seven decades, the magazine has published weekly in English across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, and since 1996 it has also existed online. A separately run Dutch edition reaches readers in the Netherlands and Belgium. Along the way, New Scientist has changed hands multiple times, attracted serious criticism from serious people, and built an entire ecosystem of books, festivals, and reader-driven columns. The questions worth asking are: how did a shilling magazine become a global institution, what values does it hold, and where do its critics say it falls short?

• 2. Founding and Early Years

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  The original cover of New Scientist listed its articles in plain text, with no illustrations to draw the eye. Page numbering followed the conventions of academic journals, running sequentially across each quarterly volume rather than resetting with each issue. A reader picking up a March issue might find themselves starting on page 649.

  By 1961, the founders' original choice of name had been quietly trimmed. "The" was dropped from the title, and the magazine became simply New Scientist. From 1965, illustrated covers replaced the text-only format. Colour printing, however, remained a cover-only luxury until the 1970s. Inside the magazine in 1964, a regular section called "Science in British Industry" gave dedicated space to applied science in commerce. These early editorial decisions reflected a publication still finding its identity: serious enough to number pages like a journal, but plainly aimed at a reading public rather than a specialist one.

• 3. Ownership and Transactions

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  In 1970, the Reed Group, which later became Reed Elsevier, acquired New Scientist through a merger with IPC Magazines. Reed held on to the title even when it sold off the bulk of its consumer publishing in a management buyout to the company now known as TI Media.

  The next change came in April 2017. RELX Group, the renamed Reed Elsevier, sold New Scientist to Kingston Acquisitions, a group put together by Sir Bernard Gray, Louise Rogers, and Matthew O'Sullivan specifically to acquire the magazine. Kingston Acquisitions renamed itself New Scientist Ltd shortly after the deal closed. That arrangement did not last long. In March 2021, Daily Mail and General Trust, known as DMGT, purchased the magazine for 70 million pounds. DMGT gave public guarantees of editorial independence, ruling out staff cuts and the sharing of editorial material between New Scientist and its other properties. By December of that year, DMGT announced the magazine would move into a new internal division called Harmsworth Media, alongside the daily i newspaper.

• 4. Cartoons, Characters, and Culture

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  Throughout most of its history, New Scientist has run cartoons alongside its science coverage, treating them as a form of comment on the news as much as light relief. Cartoonist Bill Tidy's strip, Grimbledon Down, ran from 1970 to 1994, a twenty-four year run that outlasted several editors. Regular contributors like Mike Peyton and David Austin supplied the magazine's visual wit across decades.

  A column called Ariadne introduced one of the magazine's more distinctive characters: Daedalus, a fictitious inventor created by David E. H. Jones. Daedalus specialised in devising inventions that were plausible in their internal logic but entirely impractical in practice, often developed by an equally fictitious organisation called DREADCO. The column later transferred to the journal Nature. Tom Gauld, more recently, has supplied a cartoon for the Letters page. Reader participation has always shaped the magazine's personality. The Last Word section invites questions and answers on scientific and technical topics from readers, and the Feedback section draws on reader-submitted examples of pseudoscience.

• 5. Circulation and the Dutch Edition

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  In the first half of 2013, New Scientist's international circulation averaged 125,172 copies. That figure represented a 4.3% drop from the previous year, though the magazine's editors noted it was a smaller contraction than many comparable titles were experiencing at the time. UK circulation fell again by 3.2% in 2014, but stronger international sales pushed the overall figure up to 129,585.

  June 2015 brought an expansion into a new language market. A monthly Dutch edition launched that month, absorbing the staff and subscriber base of a pre-existing Dutch science magazine called NWT. Published by Veen Media as an editorially independent operation, the Dutch edition draws heavily on translations from the English-language version but also publishes original articles, mostly focused on research conducted in the Netherlands and Belgium.

• 6. Format and Books

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  Until May 2019, the magazine's structure included sections for news, technology, opinion, features, book and event reviews under the heading CultureLab, a humour section called Feedback, and The Last Word. From issue 3228, dated the 4th of May 2019, a redesign introduced what the editors described as "a fresher, brighter feel". A new Views section was inserted between the news and long-form features, and regular columnists were added to the culture pages. The back of the magazine gathered the long-running Feedback and Last Word columns together with puzzles and a Q and A section under the heading Back Pages.

  The Last Word column proved popular enough to generate a publishing programme of its own. The first book drawn from it appeared in 1998, and subsequent volumes followed in 2000, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2014. Titles include Does Anything Eat Wasps?, Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, How to Fossilise Your Hamster, Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?, How to Make a Tornado, Why Can't Elephants Jump?, Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, and Question Everything. Since 2016, the magazine has also run an annual science festival in London under the name New Scientist Live, drawing scientists and science presenters to the event each year.

• 7. The EmDrive Controversy

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  In September 2006, science fiction writer Greg Egan published a critique of New Scientist that went well beyond a standard letter of complaint. Egan argued that "a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers" had made the magazine's coverage unreliable enough to pose what he called a real threat to the public understanding of science. His immediate target was the magazine's treatment of Roger Shawyer's proposed electromagnetic drive, a space propulsion concept that Egan said violated the law of conservation of momentum. Egan described himself as "gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy" in the piece, and accused the magazine of publishing "meaningless double-talk" that obscured the fatal flaw in Shawyer's argument. He called on readers to write in and push the magazine to raise its standards.

  Editor Jeremy Webb replied in defence of the article. His position was that New Scientist is "an ideas magazine," and that writing about hypotheses alongside established theories is central to what the publication does. The exchange set out a tension the magazine has navigated since its first issue: between the rigour expected of science journalism and the appetite for speculative, horizon-scanning coverage that has always been part of its character.