In Defence of “the New JPG Magazine”

The publisher of JPG Magazine has been slow to respond to a blogstorm that broke into full flames when the founders of the online consumer-generated magazine wrote about their departure from the now-commercial publication.

A note was added to the 8020 Publishing site, and reposted on Flickr. The offending part of the JPG website (where the story of the magazine’s early days were recently expunged) has been updated to include a reference to their founders, and pointing at the archived copies of the first six issues).

But it took the spouse of a JPG employee to make a full defence of publisher Paul Cloutier.

In a crisis (and JPG has been in crisis mode this week, even if they didn’t admit it, you need to respond quickly, and you need to appear open and caring. Curt statements may be okay in the first hour or two of a crisis, but when your detractors are writing thousands of words about the situation, you have to engage in the discussion – even if you steer clear of some aspects of the story.

In his post, Flickr member Wilson Minor offers the other side of the story:

… "But none of that means that Paul and everyone else who works for JPG are corrupt, or deserving of any of the things that have been said about them over the past 24 hours. Is it possible that they might be struggling to deal appropriately with a difficult and messy situation?"

Of the people at JPG and 8020 Publishing, he says:

"These are people you’re talking about. Smart, passionate, imperfect people like you and me who worked really hard on something that you appreciated. Say what you want about the ‘new JPG’, it took a lot of work to transform a print-on-demand labor of love into a real live newsstand magazine and grow a thriving community and build a successful business, all in an impressively short space of time."

And finally, Minor questions the actions of founder Derek Powazek:

"A friend of mine compared it today to driving in our cars, flipping each other off and cussing and cutting people off. Things we’d be ashamed to do in person, in a grocery store or at work. And as hard as it is for me to say about someone I’ve looked up to for a long time, I think Derek’s recasting of his friend and partner as an incompetent, power-hungry villain – while it makes a good story – falls into the same category."

This is the kind of push-back that would have been valuable to see early in the crisis. Everyone knows there are two sides to every story, but when you can only see one side, you are swayed to accept it as the whole story.

Tags: jpg magazine, publishing, magazines, controversy, blogstorm, flickr, 8020 publishing, wilson minor, paul cloutier, image