JPG Magazine

» see jpgmag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

jpg was a printed photography magazine that its readers helped edit. print magazines about photography, in english, sold on american shelves, were never going to find me in ankara. i knew the online photo world of that decade through the sites everyone used, not through a glossy you subscribed to.

derek powazek and heather champ started jpg in 2004 as a small personal thing. in 2006 it relaunched with real money behind it, funded by halsey minor of cnet and run by a san francisco startup called 8020 publishing. the model was the interesting part. readers uploaded and voted on each other's photos, and the ones that rose to the top got printed in an issue that came out six times a year and sat on real shelves. the first month after the relaunch pulled a million and a half page views.

the founders fell out with the company and left in 2008. then the crash came. on january 5, 2009, 8020 ran out of money and shut the whole thing down, jpgmag.com included, and said goodbye to a community of around two hundred thousand photographers. a group of investors bought the pieces weeks later and kept a version of the site running. it hosted new photo themes on and off until 2019, then the brand ended up inside a stock-photo company, which is a quieter kind of dead than the one in 2009.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the model ~

the thing jpg proved, briefly, was that you could run a magazine on the work its readers gave you for free and still put it on a shelf. that is cheap on the content side and expensive on the printing side, and printing is what a recession takes away first. the community was real and the affection for it was real. it just sat on top of a paper product in the exact years paper products stopped making sense.

~ the long tail ~

the revived jpg was never quite the same magazine. it kept the uploads going as a website and changed hands a couple of times, slowly stopping being a place anyone built an identity around. by the time a stock-photo site owned the name in 2020, the part people had loved, the printed issue voted up by strangers, had been gone for eleven years.

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