Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹 on Nostr: "Mentioning Trump in headlines was now allowed. “But let’s be realistic about the ...

"Mentioning Trump in headlines was now allowed. “But let’s be realistic about the world we live in,” he told his staff. Last August, Ewalt warned, Springer Nature could have easily decided that the magazine’s “$4 million in losses” wasn’t worth risking millions more that the company earned from federally funded subscriptions to its scientific journals. He had been “trying to keep Springer Nature from freaking out and shutting us down,” he said.

As the meeting came to an end, Ewalt seemed optimistic. “This is useful,” he said. “We’ll do this more.”

But staffers still felt uncertain. Could people really trust their editor in chief to stand by their reporting, like he promised? Or would he retract articles if readers sent too many angry emails, or if Springer Nature’s billionaire CEO called? Those concerns, one staffer said, weren’t “quelled in that meeting at all.” Rather, it had transformed accumulated gossip and implication into something far more concrete—and “set everybody’s teeth on edge,” said another staffer, who, like a number of sources for this story, chose to speak anonymously because they feared retaliation from current or prospective employers. “He was trying to be honest with us,” the staffer said. But, also, it “alarmed the shit out of everybody.”

Another meeting never took place.

In April, the staff of Scientific American took the first formal step to form a union with the Writers Guild of America East, citing a number of concerns, including editorial independence. And on June 23—three days before the National Labor Relations Board was scheduled to count the unionization votes—Springer Nature announced that it was selling the magazine to a little-known company called LabX."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/scientific-american-springer-nature-trump/

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