Celebrating 25 Years of J2 Media

It was the year 2000. A dozen eggs cost .91, websites didn’t exist, and the Y2K crisis was a big fat nothing. And I had no idea how to run a business. But how hard could it be?

Jason Heinkel, my husband and business partner, and I had already been working together- in fact, that’s how we met. We both had our beginnings in television news, and both decided that was not the life for us. I was freelancing at the time, writing and producing videos, and he was traveling the world shooting them as a camera operator for every major network, sports, and cable channel.

Together, we began doing really, really fun work. To this day, friends tease him about bringing his girlfriend to a shoot at the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Heffner. We explored caves for the world’s scariest places, went to Legoland and a Disney Cruise to showcase Top 10 Family Vacations, and even chased race cars for the Baja 500.

The only glitch was that our work was building other people’s businesses. We wanted to create a foundation for ourselves and not rely on the whims of other people. So we filed the paperwork, and on April 7, 2000, J2 Media was official.

It took a little time to build, though. Like every entrepreneur, the transition to business owner was more difficult than we thought it would be, and it was full of surprises. Jason continued traveling the world, heading to places like the Galapagos with Morgan Freeman, Florida with Warren Sapp, and Alaska with Jim Belushi. My efforts were a little more mundane, joining networking groups and making phone calls.

We began to build our own success. Mostly with promotional or training videos, which might not have been as exciting as our other work, but the clients were ours. At the time, equipment was exclusive and expensive, so most companies would create a video and hold onto it for years before investing in another one.

And then came the Internet.

Everyone needed a video for their website, and soon companies expected us to put those videos on the web for them. We were no longer just a video company; we transitioned into a full-service marketing agency offering social media, graphic design, editing, camera operations, and community relations.

Not only did we find a niche in helping other businesses succeed, we decided to create our own programming; a national instructional baseball show (Baseball Player University) built on Jason’s love of the game, a documentary, “Our Story”, documenting the history of local Holocaust Survivors, and a comedy “That’s So Boulder” that was side barred by Covid but finding a new life as we speak.

Since our humble beginnings with an extra bedroom doubling as a shared office, technology has evolved, the platforms have changed, and no one is watching a 10-minute training video anymore! We’ve had to evolve with the times (more than once!), but the basics are the same – storytelling, creative visuals, and caring as much about our clients’ success as our own.

25 years is a long time for any company to be in business. I think we owe our longevity to the fact that telling stories and helping businesses is who we are – not what we do. We’ve worked with great businesses, donated our time and services to nearly every nonprofit that asks, and built a network of clients that we consider friends. Jason and I are proud of what we’ve built and look forward to each project as if it was the very first.