Also there is the factor of the original owners/founders being forced out by a greedy friend that they trusted early on so the “soul” of the magazine was robbed years ago…

Merrill

In other news, [thanks to poodly on flickr, who writes junk for code ] RMIT, has set up an online journal, called Second Nature , and is taking scholarly submissions, of text, no word on images yet? …

Most likely people bought it who were in it, and possibly people who hoped to be in it, otherwise it didn’t really present a compelling reason to purchase it.

“Other than bragging to your friends at the local café, what exactly was the benefit of appearing in JPG?”

A hundred bucks a photo and a free subscription. Not a boatload, but then very few editorial mags these days pay a boatload. To be honest, unless something like e-paper comes into existence (and fast), most magazines are on borrowed time.

The one story I published in JPG was less for the $$ and more for finding another distribution source where I can be randomly “discovered” by people who need specific types of imagery (storm imagery). You may laugh about people “finding” me from a mag like JPG, but if you’d asked me two years ago I’d have said the same thing about Flickr. And I cleared over 10K last year from agencies finding me on Flickr. It took pointing the Digg and the Reddit and the Fark firehoses at my work a few times, but it does seem to work.

“A mix is probably closer to the truth but I’ve always been in the aspirational camp and that means running photography that not even my editor understands.”

If your editor doesn’t understand it, chances are the viewing public doesn’t either.

And for the record, I thought JPG was a fine publication. I regularly buy photo books and magazines and think there was, and is a place for the type of work they published there. I don’t think it was “flickr – the magazine” at all. The magazine was inexpensive to purchase and was filled with images. Nothing wrong with that.

And they paid their contributors, too. Not much, but better than some publications. I am proud to have had my images in JPG.

How good could the on-line voting have been when anyone could just blast e-mail their friends and have them vote for them. It simply makes no sense. At least Communication Arts uses a judging system of notable people for their Photo Annual. Could you imagine if the few remaining prestigious Photo Annuals used an on-line voter system?

JPG lacked direction, and it came back to bite them. Expecting drastically lower content cost to be a path for profits smacks of greed. Even though many established publications don’t pay some contributers, at least they are worth the notoriety of appearing. Other than bragging to your friends at the local café, what exactly was the benefit of appearing in JPG?

That’s a great observation!

Why do people still go to movie theaters, watch broadcast television (and endure the commericials), rent or buy DVDs or pay for cable subscriptions when, instead, they could spend all their viewing time watching the thousands of clips playing on YouTube? Because the stuff in the theaters, available on DVD and on broadcast and cable TV is professionally written, produced, and made with talented and experienced casts and crews. Consequently, the resulting products are elevated above the masses, leastwise, above what the masses are, for the most part, capable of producing.

Even the lowest-end reality crap is better produced than most of what you see on YouTube. Try projecting two-hours of the BEST of YouTube on screens at your local cineplex– See how many seats you fill.

I think its unlikely the content (and/or the lack of its associated costs) was the issue directly speaking. But in the sense that the content didn’t generate a readership that extended too far beyond its contributors; it was a culprit. Its one thing for youtube or flickr to operate on one level by popular consensus, but its a whole other thing to ask people to pay for something curated that way. (and then convince advertisers each month that more people will pay for it than the month before).

Curating, editing, art direction, etc, the vision and skill therein comes before the work itself in magazine publishing. And that’s a huge part of what people pay for. Do you read the NYT or the WSJ? Or do you just have igoogle set to aggregate the most popular news items for you? Same issue.

But as to why a print mag in these days? Simple, print still has more cache than an online magazine. Quite often when I’m talking to photographers for 180 magazine (180mag.ca) they will ask if there’s a print edition but never do I get asked what the readership is.

The value of any magazine, print or online, is the editing. There’s no question about that in my mind, I can stumble and digg and flickr or go to any of the online photo-sharing sites and look at the “top photos” to see what the masses there vote to the top. I don’t want to be paying money to do that, I want someone else to do that and present me with what they’ve found.

Kim Taylor

JPG as a magazine was so much married to Flickr that you might as well have just called it “Flickr: The Magazine”… for real. Everyone associates Flickr with digital crap and very little that aspires. On Flickr, you can view the content online for free enmasse… not just 50 pages of voted images but a daily feed… why would a print magazine work that is based on this site? Seriously.

I think that it was doomed the day that it started… even in the branding itself, the logo and certainly in the marriage with Flickr… everything screamed amateur/digital/lame – JPG sounds like a low quality file… you can’t associate yourself with a brand like Flickr and expect a printed magazine to work.

Why not, “Myspace: The Magazine”, or “Facebook: The Magazine”… the audience that participate on the sites are huge, why not magazines? BECAUSE, the content would be garbage.

As you said, the printed page must be VALUABLE content… maybe even beyond valuable and into exclusive… the caliber of content must be very high and also perceived as high… both. It must be a caliber of content that is elevated above the masses….not created with content from the masses.

Regards,

dR

Now, if you want to talk about Burn being published as a print magazine, I think you might have something. But that seems quite the different beast than JPG, which had more of a flicker feel, whereas Burn has a “some of the best new work I’ve seen in a long time” feel…

Editors still chose the pictures that went into the magazine. The voting was just to think the herd a bit. Getting a billion votes did not mean getting published, nor was it impossible to get published if you didn’t get a lot of votes.