Today, Derek Powazek posted an article on his blog offering up The Real Story of JPG Magazine. It seems Derek and wife Heather Champ were recently muscled out of their roles at JPG Magazine and 8020 Publishing, both of which count the couple as founders.
The Truth
As the story goes, 8020 decided to re-invent JPG Magazine from the ground up, including the story of it’s origin. As any marketer will tell you, a good genesis story is essential in winning the hearts, minds, and subscriptions of new users. Derek and Heather had conceived of JPG while on a walk in Buena Vista Park two years earlier and saw no need to erase or embellish that fact. All parties involved refused to budge, and Derek and Heather decided to leave.
The Fallout
In addition to founding JPG, Derek and Heather are well known and well liked in the design, blogging and photographic communities. Heather is the Community Director at Flickr and Derek has written books on the same subject. Clearly, if they have a story to tell, it will be heard. As I write this, a search for “jpgmag” at Flickr reveals pages of nearly identical images: Dozens of angry users are weighing in by boycotting JPG Magazine, canceling their accounts, and posting the screen shots of the confirmation page. Derek insists that, as a founder and shareholder, he wants nothing but success for JPG. I wouldn’t wager a guess as to how much this curfuffle will actually affect JPG’s bottom line, but I think a point has been proven.
The Principal
I find it interesting that Derek and Heather didn’t take issue necessarily with the relative good or evil associated with reinventing the JPG genesis story. They were personally insulted by the re-imagining of their own history, and decided to take a stand. They felt that JPG had been a labor of love, and was something that they had gone through with their community. To abandon that part of the story would do a disservice to that labor and to that relationship. This may be a fitting parable for the constant inability of marketing types to understand what those of us personally invested in a project go through. Either way, kudos to Derek and Heather for taking a stand and trusting their community, and to their community for backing them up.