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Wow. This week’s issue of Critic is the 24hr issue. We started work on it at 6am last Wednesday, and we’re just now about to send it off to print at 6am on Thursday morning. All of the content and design has been completed within 24hrs. Needless to say, we’re all pretty exhausted.

As far as I’m aware, this has never been done before. A lot of people asked, why? Why the hell are you doing this? It wasn’t easy to provide an answer. I don’t have a great answer. The idea popped into my head, and I wanted to see if we could do it. We wanted to take on the challenge and do something a bit different. We’ve made 24 Critics this year, and this seemed like an opportunity to mix it up.

Really, I was interested in what the result was going to be. Was it all going to turn to shit? Would the quality of the writing plummet? Would we all just end up lying on the floor in the foetal position? Or would the pressure really bring the best out of people? Would we reach new heights of creativity and insight?

Interestingly, people really turned it on. The writing was impressive – there were less errors, the grammar was better than usual, there were even less typos. Maybe the pressure of banging things out in 24hrs brought the best out in people. Or maybe they just felt sorry for the editing team, since we weren’t sleeping for 24hrs, and wanted to make sure their work was as good as possible.

The greatest thing that came out of it for me was the atmosphere in the office. I love that magazines are collective endeavours. No one can achieve anything alone, and all of the moving parts have to come together to make it work. However, the advent of the Internet means that most people don’t come into the office to work on Critic anymore. People are isolated from the experience by the screen in front of them. They type away at home, or hidden away in the library, and simply email their copy in.

We’re living through the age of individualism, and largely I’m okay with that. We’re now much less constrained by social mores and customs in how we live our lives. However, we lose something when we lose community - when we lose the need and ability to do things together as a group. We all know that group projects at Uni are pretty much the worst thing ever, but there is something satisfying about achieving something as a group that you actually want to be a part of, that can’t be replicated otherwise.

Thanks guys. You made it awesome.