Fast, cheap, good: pick two.
You may have heard the adage, and it makes lots of sense applied to the world of media. We’ve already examined the exigencies of fast and relished the comforting ripples good can generate… but can cheap ever fit in with a quality ethos?
Fortuitously, three editorial up-and-comers seemed to be wondering the same thing when they announced the 48 Hour Magazine project last spring.
The editors aimed to crowdsource a print magazine in just 2 days, keeping costs low and readability high. They revealed a theme to the public at 12 p.m. one Friday and shut down submissions the next afternoon, just 28 hours later. By noon Sunday, completed magazine files were on their way to MagCloud, a print-on-demand publishing service.
Yeah. Pretty fast.
Turns out the magazine was good, too. I make that claim in part because I’ve read it and also because it immediately earned the attentions of a big, bad corporate legal department.
Helpfully shooting a little fire-retardant foam on my assessment was a project-manager colleague, a veteran of round-the-clock press checks, who liked the paper but was unimpressed by the saddle-stitch binding. “This,” he intoned, balancing the 60-pager on his hand so I could see its cross-section bowing like a palm leaf, “is what fast gets you.”
In the end, graceless binding notwithstanding, 48 Hour Magazine was fast and good, but not cheap. The value represented by a gang of accomplished writers, editors and artists—likely toting their own equipment—by the donated workspace, by comped coffee and printing services cannot be ignored. Nor can that of the 1500+ submissions from the global crowd.
It seems instructive, though, that the currencies of new technology, creative vision, hard-core skill and mutually respectful relationships were apparently strong enough to trade for those choice contributors and sponsors, and the connections and resources that came with them—appropriately, the best kind of hustle.
So, can cheap ever jibe with quality? You tell me; I’d love to know what you think. I think finding fast, cheap and good in a creative project remains as rare as the ivory-billed woodpecker.
But if 48 Hour Magazine is to be believed and cheap can denote the capacity to use your own hard-won skills and reputation to attract and acquire other resources—maybe we’re all richer than we think.
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I don’t view it as Venn-diagramy as this, I think it’s more of a spectrum. You can get cheap quickly and it can turn out to be good. If what you are looking for is a pair of sunglasses on the street. Get a cheap pair, have it happen fast, and you’ll be good for the day.
I’m getting exhausted thinking about the 48 hour mag process.
What really stood out to me in this is the idea of highly-talented people willing to sacrifice what they’d normally be paid for some form of greater good (though it may be argued that they are simply building equity for future endeavors). The same thing is going on right now in the NBA (and did a couple of years ago with the Celtics, too).
The idea of quality being cheap can only exist when a resource allows itself to be consumed at a lesser price because the overall payoff will be greater. In the case of the NBA, there is a trend for players to take a lesser salary because they know they will have a higher quality product (the team). Sure, they make less money in the process, but the overall payoff (once the product or team has proved itself) will be even greater.
Maybe I’m way off base. But hey, it’s Friday! Great post.
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