THIS NEWS FOUND AT: PDNPulse
As many as 20 entities are in a bidding war for whatever’s left of 8020 Media, which announced last week it would stop publishing JPG magazine and go out of business.
A memo from 8020 Media CEO Mitch Fox (posted on SaveJPG.com) claims JPG has entertained offers from 20 possible buyers and has set a date of January 7 for bids. This is the same Mitch Fox who said last week his company was out of money and would close “immediately.”
On the JPG blog, COO Devin Poolman writes that “this interest has bought us a little more time,
so we are now looking to keep the site open at least through next week.” The site was scheduled to shut down today.
In the rumor mill, TechCrunch reports that photo-sharing sites Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) and SmugMug are among the possible buyers, and blogging platform WordPress was interested in the magazine but dropped out of bidding. Also, entrepeneur Alexander Muse writes on his blog that he wants to buy JPG.
Are you thinking what we’re thinking?
It smells like 8020 Media’s announcement that they were “closing” was a handy way to drastically cut staff in preparation for a fire sale. Consider this portion of Fox’s letter:
wrote about our demise…it was great of you to jump on the story, and we
appreciate and respect the effort you put forth to get the story just
right…after all, 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. It surely has value.”
Come on. A “great property” doesn’t lay off all its employees at once. 8020 management should not get a pass for declaring that they’re not an ongoing business on January 1, and then trumpeting their “prospect for profit” on January 4.
The JPG fiasco deepens our skepticism of user-generated content as a profit engine. But for the sake of the many fans and contributors to JPG, we hope somebody can salvage this wreck.
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