48 Hours makes an impressive debut

The headline up there comes with a caveat: I haven’t seen the physical product that resulted from the flurry of activity that resulted in 48 Hours magazine, but having monitored its progress over the two-day period this weekend and seeing thumbnails of the 60-page first issue (actually referred to as issue zero because of its beta-like status), I’m impressed. Impressed enough to shell out $10 for the pleasure of holding it in my hands.

Here’s how it worked: those behind 48 Hours announced a theme for the first issue on May 7. That theme was the rather appropriate “hustle.” writers, photographers and artists then had 28 hours to submit work, after which the editors and designers involved would use the remaining 20 hours to assemble selected pieces into a magazine.

Amazingly, given that things wrapped up on Sunday according to that schedule, the magazine went on sale today on Magcloud.com. According to the editors, they received 1,502 submissions, selecting work from 74 contributors to fill the 60 pages. The result looks well thought out, all the more so given the constraints under which they worked.

As interesting as this is as a singular experiment with technology-aided  flash publishing, the truly remarkable thing will be to see the projects that follow this example, inspired by what is possible when most of the barriers to entry are removed from the publishing world.