The first 48 Hour Magazine is out! What a fantastic experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits. As the name suggests, 48h was written, photographed, illustrated, designed, and edited in two days.
From noon on May 7th through noon on the 9th, a team circled up around the original Rolling Stone conference table in Mother Jones’ offices to transform 1,502 submissions from around the world into a chorus of voices, all harmonizing around the same theme: hustle. 48 Hour Magazine features 60 pages of writers and artists from your favorite magazines sharing space with previously unpublished new talent, shaped by some of the best editors in the business.
Phenomenal. Refreshing. I love it.
Preview the issue on MagCloud.
Buy Issue Zero.
Check out the images of the making of over on flickr.
It’s a gargantuan effort no doubt, and it looks pretty good. The thing is, what’s so new about this? How does it erase media’s old limits? Does it really? None of the contributors were paid. None of the proprietors earned any money yet, either, as far as anyone knows. Really the only thing special here is that it was produced in 48 hours and printed (sort of) on demand.
May 12th, 2010 / 11:21 am
I have to agree. What limits were erased? I looked carefully at the preview, intending to buy a copy, but it uses standard mag layouts that we all have been looking at for the last 25+ years.
Timelimits? I don’t know. In college we designed and produced a literary magazine in about 48 hours because we had put it off and were going to lose our funding if we didn’t get something to the printer.
So congrats on the idea and the project, but I am not sure any new ground was covered here.
May 12th, 2010 / 11:43 am
Jean-Marie, we actually are paying contributors. You can see our payment breakdown and complete financial overview here: http://48hrmag.com/blog/19-a-fistful-of-dollars.
As for how it breaks down old limitations in media, the idea was to find ways that we could use the tools of new media (crowdsourcing, social networks, online collaboration systems) in the creation process, while still putting out a print product. Digital and print media often remain siloed in the process stage. Integrating them enhances the possibilities of what can be done. We considered a less conventional layout for this issue but on round 1, this made sense. We may or may not stick with it in the future. If you want some more detail on our intentions and process, there are a lot answers here: http://gizmodo.com/5530008/48-hours-1000s-of-contributors-1-magazine
May 12th, 2010 / 2:00 pm
Sarah, great. Read the Gizmodo piece, which I had missed before and that did answer a lot of questions and covered a lot of ground.
I think you knew what you were doing and your final piece shows that. I will buy one. I am only commenting on this because the process and the purpose fascinate me.
I have been involved in a couple 24 hour film events where the participants create and deliver the final edited film in 24 hours, (obviously). What makes that work is that you look at the screen as you watch the film and go, “wow, they did THAT in 24 hours?” As you may know, the subject of the film, etc. are all given to the filmmakers at the start of the 24 hours so they start from zero and write the script, film, edit and deliver in the timeframe.
I bring all that up because your project seems to have had a lot of lead time, both in setting up the mechanisms, picking a topic, etc. That doesn’t mean your end result is any less, but I think the focus on 48 hours is not the strongest feature of your mag. It’s all the other stuff involving crowdsourcing, social, online collaboration etc. that only tangentially connects with the time limit.
just my 2 cents and good job.
May 12th, 2010 / 3:14 pm