We fancy ourselves the brainchild of both old and new media, conceived from old-fashioned storytelling and powered by the instantaneous world of tweets, and blog-a-zines. Stemming from similar origins, Longshot Magazine, formerly known as 48HR Mag (CBS, please don’t sue us!), takes a traditional journalistic medium–the magazine–and uses the newest tools, mixed with raw ambition, to push beyond the media’s old limitations. Mission: write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.

48HR Magazine - a pocket documentary from ricky montalvo on Vimeo.

The experiment began in May 2010, when 35 editors put out the call for the first theme—appropriately enough “Hustle”—and received 1,500 contributions from writers and artists hailing from Rolling Stone to The Rumpus. The Longshot team then spent 48 hours trying to fit 70 submissions into a 60-page magazine, aka Issue Zero. The experiment was documented in a six-minute movie (above) by video producer Ricky Montalvo. The film provides a beautiful and intimate cinematic documentation of the ambitious crew’s 48-hour journey into the magazine industry’s uncharted waters.

Interested in becoming a contributor to Longshot? This project will revamp next month in Los Angeles, when Longshot will unveil the issue’s next theme, and publish a completely new magazine…in a very short time.

Tags: Longshot Magazine, Ricky Montalvo