Over a 48 hour period from noon July 29, 2011, through noon July 31, 2011, thousands of writers, editors, artists, photographers, programmers, videographers, and other creatives from all around the world will come together via the Internet to make a magazine from start to finish. Welcome to Longshot Issue Two.
"IT IS A REMARKABLE ARTIFACT" -- THE NEW YORK TIMES
Longshot Magazine began (under our former title as [REDACTED]) as a very simple idea. Inspired by what we were seeing with crowdsourcing projects and in print-on-demand publishing, we wanted to find out if we could do something crazy: design, write, edit, and ship a magazine -- a real goddamn magazine -- in 2 days. Holed up at Mother Jones around the conference table they inherited from the original Rolling Stone team, we put out a call for submissions and waited to see what would happen. 24 hours later, we'd gotten 1500 pieces of text and art. Somehow, over the next 24 hours we got a magazine out the door and within days we had a print product in hand.
"ONE OF THE MOST TECHNOLOGICALLY INTERESTING MAGAZINE PROJECTS TODAY" --PBS
It was a big success. Writers from the New Yorker and Wired shared pages with people who'd never been published, or even submitted anything to a magazine before. Three months later we did it again at GOOD in LA. And it was even better. Now we want to crank it up a notch yet again.
"A SUCCESSFUL TIME-TRIAL FOR MAGAZINES." -- NEW YORK OBSERVER
We're gearing up for a third round and we're bringing our one-ring circus to New York City. In addition to the print magazine, we will be releasing a more robust digital version for the iPad and, best of all, we want to be able to pay our contributors a fair fee for their awesome work.
"IT'S HARD TO BEAT THE SHEER AUDACIOUSNESS OF THE BRIGHT YOUNG MEDIA THINGS IN SAN FRANCISCO WHO TURNED A MAGAZINE AROUND IN 48 HOURS" -- COOLHUNTING
Since the beginning we've been committed to paying everyone something. For issue zero (our first) we split up the proceeds among all the contributors and that meant everyone got exactly 8 dollars and 93 cents. Not exactly rent money. We actually lost money on the next. So, now, we're asking for your help to support our talented writers, editors and artists. We want to raise $7500 so that people can get paid some real cash money. Or at least so that it becomes impractical to pay everyone with pennies.
"BUY" -- THE VILLAGE VOICE
And if you're an advertiser, you can buy an ad page this way, too. Which would be very nice of you.
This has always been a magazine of the people and we're counting on you to help us pay people a bit more for their labor. In return, we promise to make our best magazine yet.