Mat Honan: 48 Hours Is Your New Bicycle
If you’re an Internet person, you know Mat Honan. You’ll know him from his work at Wired, where he is a contributing editor, and you’ll probably know him from his various other bylines in places like Gizmodo, Mother Jones, Macworld, Time, Popular Science, Salon, his Twitter, his Tumblr, or his wildy-popular-election-era-website-turned-book, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle. (Remember back in 2008 when everyone thought Barack Obama could do everything? Right. Honan takes that to the highly amusing nth extreme.) Now, right now as in today and this week and if you search Google News, you’ll know him as one of the team responsible for creating 48 Hour Magazine.
It is exactly what it sounds like: a magazine put together from start to finish — written, assigned, conceptualized, photographed, edited, art-designed, proofed, and then proofed again — all within 48 hours. Honan and his co-founders wanted to test the limits of the medium using the new tools now available thanks to evolving technology, as well as to test the limits of crowd-sourcing amongst their extended social graph online and, presumably, the limits of puny humans subsisting on coffee and adrenaline racing against a self-imposed deadline. They put out the call on a recent Friday afternoon for submissions on the theme of “Hustle,” and their flock had 24 hours to submit. The next 24 hours was spent culling, combining and creating, and somehow at the end of it, they had it: 48 Magazine, Issue Zero, 60 pages, available for $10 on MagCloud. The buzz is hot, the reviews are good, and Honan just may have found a new bicycle.
What do you do? And, what do you love about your work?
I’m a freelance writer, my main gig is working as a contributing editor with Wired magazine. I love getting to meet so many interesting people, and being exposed to so many mind-blowing ideas in the course of my day-to-day work. And of course it’s never the same day twice. I might conduct an interview with a scientist one day, and a coffee roaster the next. It keeps me from ever being bored.
Why does the world need a 48 hr. magazine? And, why did you sign on to making it happen? Do you hate sleep?
I was there from the get-go. Alexis Madrigal, Sarah Rich and I came up with the idea in a bar, after having seen Strange Light, a magazine Derek Powazek had put together on the fly documenting an Australian dust storm. We just realized that there were all these tools out there that hadn’t previously been available that would make it possible to put together something high-quality on the fly without a lot of front end investment. We could use MagCloud for print on demand, Spot.Us for financial transparency, and harness social networks to get pieces in really, really quickly. Dylan Fareed built us an amazing back-end that let us handle submissions really well, while Heroku would let us not have to worry about astronomical bandwidth costs. So, really the idea that all these tools were out there, and that we could do it, just inspired us to try it. And of course when we were planning it, we thought we might have 100 or 200 submissions. But we had no idea we’d get 1,502 in a day. I was actually expecting more sleep. I got about 3 hours Friday night and none on Saturday night.
This project is uniquely collaborative – or is it? Is there a difference between crowdsourcing and collaboration?
I thought so. We tried to eschew titles and egos in service of getting things done. We made editorial decisions by consensus, although Sarah did have the ultimate say-so. And we had something like 40 volunteers come into the office. Because they tended to be talented people, we let them take on pretty much whatever they felt comfortable with. And that was certainly the collaborative side. As to crowdsourcing, obviously we had thousands of people providing our content, and we did turn to Twitter when we needed extra content to come in really quickly — like to find some art to go with a piece, for example.
But I do tend to distinguish the two. Collaboration implies more of a group decision making aspect, while crowdsourcing is often TOO big to effectively make decisions together. Although Jeff Howe (@crowdsourcing) did manage to get tens of thousands of Twitters to collectively decide on a book to read together for the one book/ one twitter project going on right now.
What are the essentials of a good team? (Presumably 48 hours leaves no room for error.)
Some are obvious, like talent and drive. But I also think if you’re really team-based, as opposed to vertical, you also have to have a group that works well together. You need to make sure people don’t have fragile egos, and that people are willing to compromise for the greater good of getting things done.
Are you doing the kind of work you’ve always wanted to do?
Absolutely. I love being a writer. I remember visiting Manhattan, when I was a kid, to stay with my great aunt who was on staff at The New Yorker for most of her career. She took me to Sardi’s and kept introducing me to people as her nephew, “the writer.” I think I was 11, and had just had something published in my school’s little magazine. I remember it embarrassed me at the time, but it was true. It was what I wanted to do then, and it’s what I still want to do today.
Were you ever stuck in a job you hated? What did you learn from it?
I have been. I’ve had jobs that were really and truly awful, just to pay the bills. To survive, you have to keep in mind that you are not your job — even if you love your job. But you also need to get out of that situation as fast as you can. We spend the great majority of our adult lives working. If you have options to improve those hours, you should.
Whom do you admire in your industry? Who’s doing cool stuff that you look at and wish you’d thought of?
I really admire Alexis, one of our co-founders at 48 Hour Magazine. It may sound cheesy, but I mean it. As Robin Sloan said of him, he has both stock and flow, meaning he makes big permanent things (stock) like the book on the history of green technology he just finished, as well as “flow,” which can mean your Twitter feed, your blog, or other things like that you can use to keep people engaged and interested so when your next stock comes out, people are into it. One reinforces the other.
Right now I’m just gonna bask a little bit in the flush of a successful weekend and say we’re doing the cool stuff we thought of.
Blackberries: Imprisoning or freeing?
Imprisoning. Utterly, utterly imprisoning. Mobile devices have made email explode, which was already out of hand to begin with, and have additionally created the expectation that you’ll answer it all immediately.
iPad: Productivity-enhancing or pretty distraction?
Productivity-enhancing. After buying the Wi-fi one, and using it for a few weeks, I went out and bought the 3G one. I think touch-sensitive tablets in general — not necessarily the iPad in particular — are about to take over mobile computing. There are very many people out there who have already bought their last laptop, but don’t know it yet.
Who’s my new bicycle these days?
I’m still pretty excited about Barack Obama. Healthcare was a big fucking deal. What he got done there, in the face of extreme adversity, was pretty amazing, and I think it’s just a start. He got the ball moving, and that was sorely in need of being done. I’ve been a full-time freelancer for almost ten years now. So I say this as someone who has to pay for his own health insurance. (As does my wife.) If you buy your own healthcare, you really begin to understand that the bigger issue than the expense, is that you are truly at the mercy of the arbitrary and anti-consumer healthcare insurance industry. I think getting health care passed is going to be, long-term, a tremendous stimulant to our innovation economy, as it will allow more and more entrepreneurs to strike out on their own who might not now do so simply because of healthcare issues. I think it’s going to drive the economy in ways we haven’t even really considered yet.
And so, of course along those lines I’m also pretty enamored with my own congressional representative, Speaker Pelosi.
Further Reading:
48 Hour Mag, Issue Zero: “Hustle” [MagCloud]
48 Hour Magazine: A Successful Time-Trial for Magazines [NYO]
Creating a Magazine Over a Weekend [WSJ]
Photo of Honan a la Barack Obama/Shepard Fairey via his Facebook page; photo of Honan below by Jason Madera.
My copy of 48 HR magazine just arrived today. First flip through the page brought many appreciative head nods and grunts of approval. Can’t wait to dig in properly! I will forever treasure it, knowing that there will never be another (under very real threat of legal action).
Thanks for being an inspiration Mat!