The Occasional Odd Crop

The Occasional Odd Thought

The mess at JPG magazine

I'm still a member of JPG magazine, even though Paul Cloutier, the guy running the show, is behaving like some kind of corporate clone. He has parted ways with the magazine's founders, Internet stars Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ, and the divorce has gotten ugly.

In a nutshell, Derek accused Paul of wanting to rewrite the magazine's history, leaving him and especially Heather out of it.

Paul's response has been the worst kind of generic PR happy talk, and it has satisfied hardly anyone. There are emotional discussions at Metafilter and in a couple of places at flickr (1, 2). A lot of people who haven't already made up their minds (me included) would like a real explanation of Paul's side, but according to his wife, that won't happen.

I have to believe that, on top of the fact that Derek and Heather's many passionate admirers won't be satisfied by anything he says, he's worried about getting into legal hot water if he says too much. Why he can't at least admit that is beyond me.

Still, judging from the About page at JPG, Paul is backpedaling a bit. He's restored at least some mention of the magazine's founders and beginnings. That hasn't mollified the people who got involved with the magazine because it was a Derek-and-Heather production, but it's enough to keep me on board for the time being. However, I've taken the tiny step of removing the standing link to JPG from my blog. cough*Fight the power!*cough

I've been a JPG member for less than a year. I don't know any of the people involved in this mess, and my only contact with any of them has been an e-mail exchange with Derek. One of my photos was removed from a theme at JPG, and I wrote to ask why. He answered within a half hour. Amazing.

It's too bad the magazine is losing him and Heather, and Paul is showing signs of wanting to turn it into some generic corporate creature. If that happens, I'll follow lots of other people out the door. But JPG is great, and I think it can remain great. For now at least, I'm sticking with it.

Update: I obviously missed at least part of the point in my original post. It's not all Derek-and-Heather-vs.-Paul. This flickr thread makes it clear that a lot of people (including Rion, one of my favorite photobloggers) are insulted that links to their work in the form of issues 1-6 were removed from the JPG site.

I'd be insulted, too. There's no reason not to restore those links. After all, they're still on the site (Issue 1, for example, is here).

Mostly irrelevant tangent: Rion was nice enough to comment on one of my Salton Sea photos a while back, noting that her father was born in the area. So after I wrote a story about the place and submitted it to JPG, I e-mailed her and suggested she might want to take a look at it. That was the day before yesterday, before I knew anything about the drama but she more than likely did. Wow, was that bad timing.

Update, 5/23/07: The link to JPG, you'll notice, is back. While I'm still not crazy about the way they handled the drama, if I'm going to remain a member there, I shouldn't hide from it on my blog.