After announcing closure, JPG courted by potential buyers
JPG Magazine announced on Jan. 1 that it couldn’t make ends meet and would shut down effective today, and almost immediately more than a dozen potential buyers came scrambling to make offers for the beleaguered photography magazine.
“We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times,” Editor in Chief Laura Brunow Miner wrote on JPG’s site on Jan 1.
8020 Media, the company that owns JPG, posted a memo from President and CEO Mitch Fox three days later saying he had received some 20 proposals for acquisitions or mergers.
“JPG is a great property, with a large number of loyal members, a growing advertiser base, and a real prospect for profit….not to mention the foundation of what publishing can look like in the very near future,” Fox wrote. “It surely has value.”
Fox set a deadline of Wednesday, Jan. 7 for potential buyers to send in their bids, and said the company would “vet them at that time and make a decision.”
Barely two years old, JPG is a Web site as well as a magazine that publishes six times a year. One significant departure from typical publishing business models: All content for both the Web site and the magazine is user generated. Readers upload their own photos and then vote on and review images submitted by other readers. JPG’s editors then make the final selections regarding which photos appear in the magazine. Those who get photos published receive $100 and a free yearlong subscription.
8020 Media had also previously published Everywhere Magazine, a travel publication, but suspended operations with that magazine in August 2008.
Leave a comment!