Al Abut

Digital Photography Goes To Hell For A Day

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

What is the world coming to today?

Kicking off the madness this morning, Derek Powazek, a standup guy and one of the cofounders of JPG - a photography magazine I love and a startup I almost joined back in Nov - left his baby that he started from scratch with his wife Heather because another cofounder tried to erase the story of how the magazine got started by the husband and wife superteam. Then, as if that wasn't enough, one of Flickr's most popular photographers found out a poster company stole some of her photography for a profit of thousands of dollars and when she complained about it, what did Flickr do? They decided to ban her original photos for her troubles, of course!

WTF is up with all this drama, censorship and power-tripping? I'm having Web 1.0 flashbacks.

But it looks like there might be some serious Web 2.0-style payback, at least for JPG - the publicity from the faux paus has already resulted in droves of paying subscribers cancelling their subscriptions, deleting their accounts and deciding to stop contributing their stories and pictures. That's a pretty serious blow towards a business model that rests entirely on the idea of fostering an active and involved community. Whether it's a death knell or not remains to be seen (the magazine is projected to do $2.5 million in revenue during its first year, according to some accounts) but it was fascinating to see the power of digg firsthand - the commenters on the thread actually counted down the number of subscribers on JPG's home page as people removed their accounts.

Update: Paul tells his side of the JPG story. My take: putting aside the generally cool tone of the writing and the neutral CEO corporatespeak (avoiding a sense of ownership with a lot of "we" this and "we" that), Paul flatly denies that anyone tried to rewrite the story behind JPG's creation but without giving any reason why Derek would leave his own company. But here's the really creepy part: I think I may have caught Paul in a lie, because although JPG's about page currently mentions both the early pre-8020publishing issues and Heather's involvment, Google's cached version from May 9th is noticeably different and doesn't have any of that verbiage at all. Tsk tsk.

related topics on the web: jpg, jpgmag, flickr, photography, censorship, powazek