A Print-on-Demand Magazine

The first issue of 48 Hour Magazine, though printed on old-fashioned paper, is one of the most technologically interesting magazine projects today.

• The staff of 48 Hour Magazine sent off its finished "Issue Zero" to MagCloud, a print-on-demand service, at noon on May 9 after a harried two-day submission, editing and design process.
  
• Following weeks of building buzz about the project, primarily through Twitter, the editors announced the issue's theme, "Hustle," at noon on May 7.
  
• Contributors then had all of two days (hence the "48 Hour" title) to send in their writing, photos, art and infographics around that loosely defined concept. Using not only social media, but also a custom-built content management system and a live video stream, the editors, all experienced writers and creative types, crafted a polished magazine through methods that re-imagined the standard magazine publication process from beginning to end. As they describe it, the magazine is "a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits."
• Making a magazine in two days clearly isn't for every publisher, but the 48 Hour Magazine project demonstrates that even this old medium can be reinvented with technical savvy and creativity.

A Social Media Strategy

• The 48 Hour staff began by using their website to solicit the email addresses of people interested in contributing to the magazine.
  The result was over 5,000 responses.
  
• They chose to spread the word about the project primarily through Twitter, avoiding the use of Facebook for the project, partly due to the site's recent privacy changes.

• The Twitter and word-of-mouth marketing strategy seems to have worked.
  Within that short 48-hour period, the editors received over 1,500 submissions.
  An intense editing process distilled these to just 70 pieces that fill 60 pages.

Technology on Deadline

Sure enough, challenges arose.

• Some submissions didn't make it into the content management system due to technical difficulties.
  They required individual attention. "That sat like a time bomb until the end of the process, when our copyflow processes got very low-tech," said Alexis Madrigal, another editor on the project.
• Anyone wanting to watch the live video stream of the magazine's editing processes probably found errors on the streaming site as well. One of the editors' tweets sent not long before the submission deadline read, "Sorry about the @Ustream feed going down. We're just scraping by, bandwidth-wise."
  
• But having a transparent, publicly visible editing process turned out to be not just a technical challenge. "There is a very real tension between transparency and efficiency in these situations," Madrigal said.

Next, Issue One...and More?

• The magazine part of the project, though, has been quite successful so far for a print-on-demand magazine. Over 1,400 copies at $10 each had been sold as of May 14, all via MagCloud.
  
• Another advantage of the magazine's print-on-demand publication process is the ability to revise and update content as needed. The edition of the magazine being sold through MagCloud as of this writing is actually version 0.1, in which some contributors' names have been corrected and added, and a couple of typos were fixed.
• In addition to the magazine's print product, its staff is also posting some of the work from the magazine online.
  
• Some people who sent in submissions not selected for publication have suggested on the magazine's blog that their work could be posted on the magazine's website instead.

SOURCE: Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Mass Communication and Journalism Department at California State University, Fresno. Her research focuses on magazines and media communities. She also blogs at sivekmedia.com, and is the magazine correspondent for MediaShift.