This morning, J-Lab announced the recipients of the Knight-Batten Innovation Award, and SF-based experimental 48 Hour Magazine got recognized with a $1,000 prize. It's perhaps more accurate to refer to it as the magazine formerly known as 48 Hour. After the project, sparked in April at Toronado bar when writers Alexis Madrigal, Sarah Rich and Mat Honan were out drinking and talking, went viral, CBS gave them the ole cease-and-desist. (One common Twitter response: Who knew that "48 Hours" was still on the air?) Some haggling ensued, but the principals were forced to announce that no amicable agreement had been reached to allow them to keep the name.

But the legalities aside, the 48 Hour team soldiers on with a new name—meet Longshot Media, LLC, registered by the three principals. According to Madrigal, reached in Washington, D.C. where he was working for a short stint at the headquarters of his new job as technology editor at the Atlantic Monthly, Longshot will likely be the new name of the magazine itself.

The idea of calling it, say, 47 Hours occurred to the group, but they decided against anything too self-referential. "Instead of embedding this fight into our name in perpetuity, we are going to try to understand what was so exciting for us in doing the project," Madrigal said. It was "a risky, crazy thing that might not work" but did in fact succeed. The central conceit of releasing a theme to the world, giving people 24 hours to submit work in all kinds of media and then editing and laying it out in another day hit a nerve. Over 1,500 offerings were garnered — and 30 published — as the crew of sleepy editors, illustrators and designers pulled a few all-nighters over a weekend in early May in the donated offices of Mother Jones. As an SF Weekly report on the process detailed, it was a whiskey- and adrenaline-fueled affair. 

Which is not to say that things couldn't be improved. For issue #2, which will likely happen in the Good magazine offices in LA at the end of August, Madrigal says that more attention will be paid to the instructions sent out to the world of would-be contributors. He estimates that 80 to 90 percent of the written submissions were fiction—but the goal was always to emphasize reported pieces. A more detailed packet, with some advice on how to approach reporting, is planned. Madrigal says he will spearhead an attempt to make a video of their editorial process, which makes sense, with their temporary home being in LA and all. 

Fundamentally, though, the goals remain the same — to create something special in a very limited time frame, to show the possibilities of new publishing and social media technologies, to have fun — although institutionalizing chaos is admittedly tricky. Madrigal says that one way of thinking about Longshot is that it really isn't a magazine project per se. "It's about the process of being creative," he notes, likening the project to the Bay Area-founded National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo. Madrigal imagines opportunities for Longshot whereby media companies employ the Longshot team for similarly styled initiatives. And, in fact, Knight-Batten awarded the magazine formerly known as 48 Hour for more than its print publication. "As important as the product was the work flow that they created," said the judges.

**Update: And the website is live! For more info, go to www.longshotmag.com.