JPG magazine: Great idea, bad business?

JPG magazine: Great idea, bad business?:

On the first day of the new year, the magazine — backed by a consortium involving former CNET exec Halsey Minor — announced that it was folding due to a lack of funds. For many, this was the second in a series of tragedies for JPG, with the first being the ousting of founders Derek Powazek and Heather Champ in May of last year, after what appeared to be a falling-out with Minor and other backers. Many people cancelled their JPG accounts as a result, in solidarity with Powazek and Champ, and it’s possible that the friction and stresses that event put on the JPG community helped contribute to its current problems.

I was really starting to get serious about my photography again and just starting to really grok JPG when Derek and Heather were purged. It created a lot of animosity (to put it mildly), and I stepped back away from JPG at the time. As far as I can tell, they never really did show that JPG was a better thing without them, and I don’t think they ever healed the rifts this caused. Not sure they tried really hard, actually. I never saw anything that made me take another shot at JPG or really take a curious look at it again. Bad (or no) marketing and PR, at the least, whether or not the change was the right thing. Since it’s folded, I guess one could argue that it wasn’t — but life’s not that simple.

But I’ve been thinking about 2009 and beyond, and what I want to do. I sort of pre-announced the revamp of my blog a couple of days ago, but beyond that? I’ve been pretty much in a shell the last couple of years, just hanging on and keeping it going, and 2009 is a year where I’m committing to digging in and doing new things and really taking a more public and innovative profile and do more creation and building. Well, 2008 was originally the year for that, but, well, that’s another blog post still to be written.

One thing I’m looking at doing is some kind of online photographic publication. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it’s based on JPG, but different — what I would have done with JPG if I’d done JPG. Back when I was doing OtherRealms, one of the things I found was that writing was good, but editing was REALLY FUN — generating a vision and shaping it and collaborating to make it happen and make everyone involved happy — was REALLY FUN. I’ve wanted to get back in a situation where I was editing in a publication format ever since, but I never found a format and topic I really wanted to do.

For the last couple of months, doing something more graphic, more photography oriented, has kept popping up; sort of like JPG, but not PURELY user-voted, and only online. Revenue something other than subscriptions, which is at best a tough option online, and honestly, paper media is dying, and photo-based paper publications are really expensive compared to normal paper publications. Bad idea all around.

So we’ll see. I thought there was an opening here, before JPG failed. Now, I really think so. I’m still not sure exactly what form, or when — but perhaps this ought to be next on the list of things to do. Anyone interested?

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