When the beloved science publication got too political, its corporate owners stepped in. Now its future is uncertain.

In March of 2026, in a nondescript, 46th-floor office overlooking lower Manhattan, about two dozen members of Scientific American’s editorial staff had gathered in person and online to talk openly about their approach to political coverage.

David Ewalt, the editor in chief, wanted them all to understand something: The magazine was not “kowtowing” to the Trump administration. In fact, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Nation, he asked staff present to “raise your hand if you’ve ever heard me say not to cover a political story.”Two people raised their hands.

For well over a year, rumors had been circulating among the staff about top-level editors’ rejecting pitches they saw as too political, controversial articles triggering angry phone calls from Scientific American’s corporate owner, and even, on at least one occasion, ownership forcing editors to blunt language critical of the Trump administration.

Then there was what happened to the opinion department. In the first months of the new administration, it had been publishing about 15 pieces a month, many of which criticized Trump’s attacks on scientific research. But after the department published a particularly provocative column in May 2025—“Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship”—management, in what one staffer would later call an “unprecedented” move, had told the department to “pause” publishing new articles until the new editor in chief started.

The opinion department’s hiatus had worried some people more than others—there were legitimate journalistic reasons to want to emphasize breaking news, even if not everyone agreed with them. But by March 2026, nine months into Ewalt’s tenure, the opinion section seemed to be gone for good—and other departments were feeling political pressure, too. That, along with a round of layoffs, a restructuring of the newsroom, and veiled threats about the future of the magazine, had left the staff frustrated and looking for answers. Now that the new editor in chief was finally coming to the full editorial staff “to listen as well as to speak,” as one staffer put it, they began asking questions.

What about that rumor, someone asked him: Had editors really been told to not put the word “Trump” in headlines?

So if Ewalt had asked people to keep Trump out of the headlines last summer, it was because corporate higher-ups were visiting the site all the time. “And if they saw the word ‘Trump,’” he said, according to the recording, “they were wetting their fucking lederhosen.”People had no idea how “lily-livered and weak-kneed and cowardly” Springer Nature was, he said. “They are so fucking afraid of the Trump administration.”The opinion editors had long since been reassigned to other roles, but now, almost a year later, Ewalt was telling his staff that even news stories sometimes had too much of a slant to them.

“I am not ever telling anybody here ‘Don’t go after the Trump administration,’” he told them. “I’m saying I don’t want to hear your opinion.”He just didn’t think it was their “strongest weapon.”If everyone stuck to objective, hard-hitting reporting, Ewalt believed that they would be able to stay out of trouble with Springer Nature.

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.”

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.

Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the United States and, among science publications, one of the most familiar and beloved. Like other publications of its caliber, it also has a tradition of editorial independence. In the 1980s, after a tumultuous split between its co-owners, it was absorbed by the German publishing empire Holtzbrinck, which currently controls both Springer Nature and the Big Five publisher Macmillan. A 1998 Vanity Fair feature called the company the “shark of choice” for struggling publishers: It promised to allow them to continue their work with minimal interference.

In recent years, however, Springer Nature’s hands-off reputation has begun to falter. Interviews conducted this summer and fall with a over a dozen current and former Scientific American employees depict a magazine that, especially over the past two years, has struggled to protect its editorial independence in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressure from its corporate ownership—a picture corroborated by audio recordings and documents obtained by The Nation.

Back in 2017, Springer Nature had made headlines when it admitted that it had censored hundreds of academic articles in mainland China at the behest of the Chinese government. But for most staffers, the first sign of a more hands-on approach came in 2021, when an opinion article about the medical situation in Gaza was pulled from Scientific American’s site after right-wing backlash.

At the time, the article’s authors received no explanation. But current and former Scientific American staffers familiar with the situation told The Nation that the reason was simple: Stefan von Holtzbrinck himself—known for his enthusiasm for Israel—had called then–editor in chief Laura Helmuth and ordered that it be taken down.

It wouldn’t be the last conflict between Helmuth and Springer Nature. Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash. This time, facing pressure from Springer Nature, she resigned.

The magazine had been struggling financially for years, but the pressure to be profitable only increased as Springer Nature repeatedly tried and failed to go public; in 2024, it finally succeeded. After Helmuth’s departure, “it felt like a pendulum swing back to ‘let’s stick to the science,’” said Kelso Harper, who was then the magazine’s senior multimedia editor. “Let’s not get involved in too much messy political stuff.”

In the first months of Trump’s second administration, though, messy politics was almost unavoidable. Trump brought disaster after disaster for science writ large—thousands of grants suspended or canceled, tens of thousands of workers fired or pressured to resign, billions of dollars of funding slashed or frozen. Scientific American’s opinion department critiqued Republican attacks on everything from trans health care and measles vaccines to fluoride and the National Weather Service.

Then, in April 2025, as the administration’s war on DEI in science continued to accelerate, psychiatrist and anthropologist Eric Reinhart posted a letter to X that the Trump-appointed US attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, had originally sent to the Illinois-based medical journal CHEST. The letter, dated April 14, asked: Was CHEST protecting the public from misinformation?

Was it disclosing when viewpoints were influenced by funders? Did it publish articles from competing viewpoints? “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter read. “The public has certain expectations, and you have certain responsibilities.”CHEST is not well-known outside its field, but the letter made national headlines as an example of the administration’s unprecedented efforts to undermine what the right called “woke” science.

Reinhart submitted an op-ed to Scientific American senior editor Dan Vergano arguing that the letter represented “an authoritarian threat to science.”As the story moved toward publication, news broke of similar letters to other journals, including the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Reinhart’s op-ed quickly progressed through an initial edit, a “top” edit, and a copy edit; according to e-mails and documents obtained by The Nation, a legal reviewer made only one, minor change.

But when the draft returned from another round of edits, this time from acting editor in chief Jeanna Bryner, the word “fascist” had disappeared, along with a reference to the genocide in Gaza. A paragraph in which Reinhart argued that fascists benefit from “self-interest, automatic obedience, and ethical cowardice” had been cut entirely. In a comment in the document, he protested: “Shying away from publicness and directness on these issues will only make them worse.”The draft next went to Springer Nature’s US head of legal for review. He left a comment declaring, with no explanation, that the cuts were “necessary.”“Got it,” Bryner responded.

Those objections were why they were “ultimately allowed to print it” at all, Lau told Jeanna Bryner and the two opinion editors in a May 2025 meeting, according to audio obtained by The Nation. The only reason things didn’t “blow up in a bigger way,” she said, was that Reinhart eventually agreed to the changes. But when the piece was eventually published, on May 1, it received little attention—probably, she said in the meeting, because they had “watered it down so much.”

And when Dan Vergano published his column “Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship” two weeks later, it was the final straw. Shortly after, Lau called Bryner, Vergano, and the chief opinion editor, Megha Satyanarayana, into the May 2025 meeting.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” Lau told them. Springer Nature felt that Scientific American’s criticism of Trump was threatening their broader business—selling subscriptions to their scientific journals. The federal government was a major client.

“I have reiterated repeatedly that we have a history of editorial independence, and that these things are crossing that line,” said Lau, referring to Springer Nature’s repeated editorial interference. “It’s very clear that they understand that. But given where our business is, and the threats to the larger business, they don’t care.”The department’s work, she said, was being placed on “pause” until the new editor in chief, David Ewalt, arrived.

Lau was explicit about the pressure they were all under. “We’re upsetting the company on a daily basis,” she said. Germany was six hours ahead of New York, and she and Bryner would wake up to early-morning calls from the German board. “If I thought me quitting would help the situation, I would have done it,” Lau said. “They are terrified about the things that are happening in the US.”Although Lau gave the editors reason to hope that Ewalt might manage to resurrect the opinion department—“I think he sees value in it,” she said—he would turn out to be on the same page as the Springer Nature executives in at least one regard: It was time to reduce opinion output significantly. During his interviews, Ewalt had pitched them his new vision of the magazine: less editorializing, more facts.

In May 2025, though, the opinion editors—like the rest of the magazine—still didn’t know much about their new boss. Lau assured them they could all talk things over with Ewalt and see how he wanted to approach the issue. “We just need to be clear that what we’re fighting for is worth it. And I’ll be honest with you,” she said, “I don’t think this is the thing I want to die on the hill for.”

“We are in a fight right now for the future of SciAm in general,” she said. “There is nothing that’s a given in our future. We are losing a lot of money, and we do not necessarily have a clear path to closing that gap.”Over the course of the next year and a half, at least 53 of the approximately 84 people employed at the magazine would either be laid off, resign, or retire.

Ewalt took over the magazine on June 2 with a mandate to increase traffic and subscriptions. But there were other changes, too. Helmuth’s departure had triggered a new attention to employees’ political expression, and Ewalt’s arrival reinstated objectivity as the journalistic North Star. Things that had produced no objections in the past became contentious: People were discouraged from following only left-leaning social-media accounts, for example, to avoid the appearance of bias.

Although he initially promised that his restructuring efforts would not include layoffs, in October 2025 10 employees lost their jobs, replaced by a slate of hires to new positions, including three breaking news reporters. In December, Kim Lau threatened further changes if revenue didn’t start picking up—more layoffs, workers guessed, or maybe a sale.

Though October’s layoffs galvanized the then-incipient union campaign, staffers had additional concerns. Vergano, who had been reassigned to report on Washington, remembers hoping that the union could serve as a counterweight to the “clear, corrosive corporate interference and influence” he’d witnessed at the magazine. That emphasis on editorial independence, said WGAE organizer Andy Greenberg, was one of the things that set the campaign apart from others he’d worked on.

“We have to look out for us,” one staffer realized, “because Springer Nature is not.”After Scientific American announced its new union in April, Springer Nature hired Littler Mendelson, the largest “union avoidance” firm in the US. A consultant with the off-putting habit of calling senior employees “young lady” was brought in to run anti-union meetings. Still, by election day, spirits were high. Union pins were everywhere. Someone brought in mitochondria cookies. “We knew it was a slam dunk,” Vergano said.

But it was becoming difficult to enjoy the moment. In the weeks after the vote, rumors began to circulate that Springer Nature executives were “basically measuring everybody’s desk to sell it,” Vergano said. “It was not subtle.”The bad news hit on June 23: sale to LabX, salary cuts, mass layoffs.

“The amount of panic, the amount of tears, the amount of ‘I don’t know the next time that I will see you, goodbye forever maybe’ conversations that were happening in the newsroom—I mean, traumatic puts it lightly,” said books and culture editor Brianne Kane. Even those who had received job offers from the new owners were told to clear their desks and that their laptops would be shut off by midnight.

The next week, a few dozen workers, freelancers, and allies gathered at the 1 New York Plaza office. Despite the previous week’s events, the mood on the picket line was jaunty. A small but energetic brass band accompanied chants of “New York is a union town,” and the signage was heavy on puns (“I Do Not Cosine These Layoffs”).

Behind the scenes, Springer Nature was still doing its best to nullify the election, including by trying to withdraw the petition for an election by pointing out that it had laid off everyone at the magazine. “This was a case where a corporate parent restructured and sold its subsidiary in a transparent attempt to defeat an election,” the WGAE wrote in a legal filing. “The Board should not reward such conduct.”When the NLRB counted the votes, the tally was 31 to 1 to unionize.

When Dan Vergano reached out to the Society of Professional Journalists’s ethics committee for advice in May 2025—shortly after the department’s work was put on pause—he was told to start by working through official channels: Going public could come at a high personal cost. Besides, as a journalist, “you don’t want to be part of the story,” Vergano said. “It’s literally stomach-churning.”