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Political Reporting
economic and ethnic backgrounds
and representing different political
leanings and ages that fall within the
full spectrum of our MTV audience.
Likewise, our team members are quite
diverse when it comes to their experiences
in media. A few are documentary
filmmakers; some are local newspaper
writers, but then there’s the phlebotomist
who never had looked through
the lens of a camera.
Given what they knew already—and
what they would need to know to do this
reporting job—it was critical that we
bring the team members to our headquarters
in New York for
a “journalism boot camp.”
The three-day Street Team
’08 orientation was an
ambitious undertaking.
These 51—one for each
state and Washington,
D.C.—relatively inexperienced
“citizen journalists”
needed to be transformed
into a nimble crew of independentwriter-shooterproducers.
To accomplish this task,
we brought in such industry
mavericks as New York
University journalism
professor Jay Rosen and
Gannett’s vice president
of design and innovation,
Michael Maness, to
cover topics ranging from
“Field Production 101” to
“Journalism in the Mobile
Landscape.” There was a special visit
from The Associated Press’s longtime
political reporter Ron Fournier,
straight off the campaign trail in New
Hampshire, when he shared videotaped
advice from political reporting notables
like NBC Nightly News political analyst
Tim Russert and correspondent
Andrea Mitchell.
With as much information as could
be crammed into three days, a backpack
full of necessary equipment, including
a small video camera and laptop
computer, a handy production binder,
and the love and support of the MTV
News staff, Street Team ’08 left New
York City to head home and embark
on their first week of reporting.
14 Nieman Reports | Summer 2008
Street Team Reporting
Since January, each Street Team
member has filed one blog or video
report each week. Their reports appear
online at www.streetteam08.com
and on a customized mobile WAP
[wireless application protocol] site
(m.streetteam08.com), and they also
have the opportunity to “bubble up”
to any of MTV’s broadcast networks,
the AP Online Video Network, and
specialized mobile video carriers.
Unlike most of MTV’s programming,
our pro-social initiatives—of which this
Two members of the Street Team use old media to read about the New
Hampshire primary results at their January orientation. Photo by
Kristin Grimmett.
is one—are not entirely dependent on
ratings to ensure success. This allows
us to experiment with content, format
and distribution, and Street Team ’08’s
work is no exception. This project is
MTV’s foray into the “pro/am journalism”
model. The material generated by
our reporters is not exactly user-generated
content, but it certainly doesn’t
run through the editorial process that
MTV News pieces do. In this model,
the “pros” are an editorial board made
up of MTV News producers who vet
the Street Team content before it goes
public, and the “ams” are the Street
Teamers themselves.
We have also been able to do some
exciting journalism experiments that
involve the Street Team using new
technology. The most ambitious of
these happened on Super Tuesday,
when we had reporters in 23 primary
and caucus states doing live mobileto-Web
broadcasting with Nokia N95
video phones and an alpha version of
Flixwagon’s embeddable player. While
the video quality of the pieces was
poor, the relevancy and immediacy of
the reports was hard to beat. One of
our edgier reporters brought her video
phone right into the voting booth with
her to visually prove the ease of the
voting process and had her footage
broadcast on MTV to a
potential audience of 88
million that same hour.
As befitting its experimental
nature, there have
been challenges with this
project. Logistics is one,
but that’s to be expected
since only two of us
supervise the 51 reporters.
Gaining a dedicated
audience is another that
is faced by news organizations
everywhere. Yet the
blogosphere presents a
whole new array of issues
for us, as it does for many
other news outlets.
Many of our young
reporters are immersed in
blogs with very firm ideological
orientations, and
on those the lines between
“news” and “opinion”
are blurred almost beyond recognition.
One of our biggest tasks then
becomes finding ways to get them to
uphold journalistic values, including
a commitment to accuracy, while still
taking advantage of the less-structured
nature of the Web so their own personalities
can come through in their
reporting. After all, the point of this
project is to give young people a voice
and a platform to air their political
concerns.
So we have tried in a number of
ways to help our reporters understand
the distinction between “personality”
and “bias” as we work to guide them
through these ambiguous waters. For
example, our Idaho reporter, Brian T.