In addition to a unique and experimental debate coming up this Saturday, MTV is teaming up with Flixwagon for an experiment in crowd-sourced journalism. While most of us will be tuned in to Twitter (assuming it's up and working) for the latest election results from Super Tuesday, MTV is sending out what they are calling an army of citizen journalists to pull some Scobles from the nation's polling stations, caucuses, candidate rallies and other political hotspots.
Just as Scoble used Qik to broadcast from the World Economic Forum, MTV Street Team members will be utilizing Flixwagon coupled with Nokia N95s to stream live from the various locations with what Flixwagon is calling "DVD-like quality." I'm certain the quality may end up being a notch or two below that, but it'll still be of a watchable quality.
Visitors to ChooseOrLose.com will be able to select the various streams from an interactive map that will show pinpoints where the various Street Team members are presently streaming live.[img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ron-flextor-ss-1.png" caption="" credit="" alt="ron-flextor-ss-1.png"]
I'm certain both the MTV planned events are all about bringing in the young voters to the primaries, and that's always an admirable goal, I suppose. In that, the citizen journalist efforts will fail miserably, as they always have. In that it is an interesting and new way to bring live political coverage to the masses utilizing a method of journalism I've been espousing quite vocally, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I say that, because if you recall, we've been bitten before when the mainstream media tries to imitate what it is we do organically on the front lines of technology. The Republican YouTube-CNN debates were a miserable failure because of the biases inherent in the Old Media screening process, and left New Media with some lasting egg on its face. I can see a number of ways that the citizen journalist efforts of MTV here can go horribly awry.
For instance, there are a number of laws regarding exactly where a member of the press can stand outside a polling place, and violation of those laws can be Federal offenses. Some of the Street Team members could turn out to be staffers from a candidate's campaign (it's happened before on a non-citizen journalist level - that it could happen here is not far fetched). The editorial process for what gets played on broadcast television could be completely skewed in terms of bias one way or the other so as to mar the reputation of the whole project.