Liz Nord, supervising producer at MTV News, takes the stage at the Online Journalism Symposium, and does a little bit of explaining that MTV is more than music video and yes, it has a newsroom.
But after the brief educational slide, she focuses on the Street Team 08 project. This brings together 51 young citizen reporters to cover the US presidential race for MTV by blogging, vlogging or producing more traditional news videos.
These reporters were carefully selected and went through a journalism bootcamp before being let loose at the start of the year.
Nord explained how the content is distributed online, on MTV TV but also to mobiles, via a Wap site, a deal with Verizon and a mobile TV channel.
Part of the aim of this pro-am project is to explore new ways of reporting. For SuperTuesday, MTV experimented with live to web broadcasting by the 51 citizen reporters, using Nokia N95s and Flixwagon.
A clip that Nord showed summed up the experiment. It was a short clip from one of the reporters who was asked if she was reporting and how. Her reply, “this is live-to-web. New technology kids!”
The video was of poor picture and audio quality, but it had a rawness and immediacy that is hard to beat.
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