Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

57 easy forecast last December, with the bank- ruptcy of the publisher of Sky & Telescope . The world’s second best-selling magazine for ama- teurs has left the free market and has gone into the management of the American Astronomical Society, the leading non-governmental organi- zation of astronomers in the States, founded in 1899 by George Ellery Hale. Today, AAS has over 7,000 members and can apparently afford to publish a magazine in a deficit. The destiny of all paid magazines for amateur astronomers is to cease publication in the com- ing years or, at best, to be absorbed (the most optimistic) by scientific institutions external to the free market. Only magazines offered for free on the web will have any hope of avoiding closure. Will the magazines of the first group be able to enter the second? Only very few of them will be able to make the leap because, in the transition from a paid magazine to free maga- zine, advertising revenues can drop by 5-10 times, and it becomes impossible to maintain the same editorial structure and satisfy the re- quests of external collaborators. The magazines for amateur astronomers of the near future will necessarily have to be produced by a minimal number of people, with skills so vast as to be able to do (in the same period) the work typically assigned to dozens of people. But even a similar effort may not be enough, be- cause the overall advertising revenue of the sec- tor magazines is continuously decreasing. This trend could worsen after Meade leaves the scene, which also went bankrupt last December after getting a super-ticket imposed by way of California antitrust laws. Finally, distributing a magazine on a global level also imposes the problematic task of detaching oneself from one’s nationality and communicat- ing astronomy so that every reader perceives the magazine as belonging to their own culture. Hard times for astronomy magazines! We have been pathfinders. Others may (perhaps) do bet- ter, but knowing how difficult it will be to join the “club,” we conclude by quoting the univer- sally known Dante Alighieri: “ Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. ” ! The near future of astronomy magazines