Interview: MTV's Ian Rowe on 'Choose or Lose' Citizen Journalists Reporting Super Tuesday - Via Mobile Video Phones

MTV’s mobilizing young voters in a whole new way.

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I take an in-depth look at how MTV’s Choose or Lose has long used the mobile medium to encourage young people to get involved and vote.

For tomorrow's big Super Tuesday contest, the youth-oriented network is taking it all to a whole new level with Street Team ’08 – a group of 51 “citizen journalists” selected by MTV to cover the youth vote via the first-ever live mobile-to-web broadcasts from polling stations, caucuses, candidate rallies and more.

This is seriously cutting edge.

The citizen journalists will be using Nokia N95 devices that feature a 5 megapixel camera and DVD-like quality video camera capabilities that allow them to create, edit and upload on-the-street reports instantly to the Internet using Flixwagon mobile broadcasting technology.

Their reports will be shown at MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com and, throughout the day, selected reports will even be shown on MTV’s cable television channel.

This morning, I spoke with Ian Rowe, VP of public affairs and strategic partnerships at MTV, about the initiative, how the mobile medium is transforming not only news reporting, but news distribution – and whether MTV’s youth audience is as gung-ho about Barack Obama as media hype would have us believe.

The answers just may surprise you.

(Approx. 15:38)

 

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