WUWT smeared by Scientific American's Bora Zivkovic ‏

Perhaps I’ll start considering the fall of Scientific American a two step function process.
The first was when a hoard of newer, flashier magazines distracted advertisers away from the quality magazine it has been for decades. That led to the sale to a German company and the quality simply collapsed and political/military policy issues replaced holograms and electrophoresis.
The second step may have a harder date to pin down, I probably stopped subscribing before then, and I’ll need readers’ help to pin that down, if indeed it there is an event. When did SciAm branch away from military policy to their current activist role? Did that happen with the fall of the Soviet Union and their need to find an new topic to blather on about? Is it more recent and is the global warming bandwagon they jumped on and are now trying to drive?
Wikipedia might have the answers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American says in part:

In the years after World War II, the magazine was in steep decline. In 1948, three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, instead purchased the assets of the old Scientific American and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partners—publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr.—created essentially a new magazine.[3] Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel’s son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteen-fold since 1948. In 1986, it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, which has owned it since.
In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck.[4]
Donald Miller died in December, 1998,[5] Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. Mariette DiChristina is the current editor-in-chief, after John Rennie stepped down in June 2009.[4]

Does this mean the glory days were 1948-1986, and the second step down in 2008? 2008 must be too late – Wiki’s photo is of a 2005 cover “Did Humans Stop an Ice Age?” The Wiki warticle also includes:

In its January 2002 issue, Scientific American published a series of criticisms of the Bjorn Lomborg book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cato Institute fellow Patrick J. Michaels said the attacks came because the book “threatens billions of taxpayer dollars that go into the global change kitty every year.”[9]

So the second step must precede 2002.

Oh man, I have to include this. The great thing about SciAm is top notch scientists wrote articles about new discoveries distilling a few years’ of technical journal articles into something that brought intelligent lay people up to speed. So, I was going to look for a list of titles and authors figuring that might show the transistion to what it is now. Wiki had a link to the Cato Institute’s reaction to the Lombord excoriation. An interesting flock of names:

Who Let the Dogs Out at Scientific American?
by Patrick J. Michaels
This article appeared on cato.org on January 17, 2002.
Scientific American has sicced the big dogs on Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg for having the audacity to publish a highly referenced book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” which argues that global warming and many other environmental “threats” are overblown. What gives?
Scientific American now joins the magazines Science and Nature in blasting Lomborg. They all editorialize that his “book is a failure” and call out four well-traveled attack dogs from the Washington big government/greenie/lefty establishment in support. They include:
*John Holdren, a defense expert from Harvard. In 1995, he published a paper for the United Nations University advocating “a condition in which no nation ‘s military forces were strong enough to threaten the existence of other states.” Good thing we didn’t listen. *Tom Lovejoy, former director of the World Wildlife Fund, the biggest green lobbying organization in the history of the planet. *John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, the most influential lobby in the Down With People crowd. And, *Steve Schneider from Stanford. Compared to the rest, Schneider is a real atmospheric scientist, and (naturally) he wrote the nastiest of the four Fatwas on Lomborg.

The only unfamiliar name to me is Bongaarts.
I should get back to work for a bit, but I think a list of titles and authors would be good. SciAm used to print a great index. I wonder if there’s something on the web.