MySpace, MTV team up to host US presidential chat

BY A CORRESPONDENT

24 August, 2007:

News Corp’s internet social network MySpace and Viacom’s MTV together are launching a series of ‘one-on-one dialogues’ with all the major candidates in the United States presidential elections.

The series comes on the heels of a recent Democratic party presidential debate held by Google’s YouTube and Time Warner’s CNN that featured pre-recorded questions from YouTube users at home and was moderated by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.

Discussions with candidates from both Republican and Democratic parties will be both televised and webcast. The presidential hopefuls will answer questions from MySpace members and MTV watchers.

Formally, this is a collaboration between the ‘Impact’ political channel of MySpace and ‘Choose or Lose’ of MTV. It is also the first collaboration that MySpace is having with MTV, the Viacom-owned pop culture conglomerate.

The conversations with individual presidential candidates will be held town-hall style on college campuses, webcast live on the MySpaceTV video platform and MTV.com and broadcast later that evening on MTV as well as the MTVU college campus television network.

Ian Rowe, MTV’s vice-president of strategic partnerships, said in an interview with CNET News.com: “These dialogues are not going to be a debate; they are going to be one-on-one, unfiltered conversations between a group of young people who are sitting inside a college campus auditorium and an audience online who will have the ability to submit questions in real-time.”

This will be, Ian Rowe added, a totally interactive experience. “They will be able to literally respond to what the candidate is actually saying during the conversation. Even if you don’t have the opportunity to be in the room physically, you can participate tangibly in the conversation.”

MySpace also plans to hold a mock election early in 2008.

The first of the MTV-MySpace dialogues has been confirmed for September 27, 2007, with Democratic candidate John Edwards in the key primary state of New Hampshire.

Future events will individually involve Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd, and Bill Richardson; and Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Sam Brownback.

The prominence of blogs in the political process was the major digital-media development in the 2004 presidential election. The ‘paper trail’ of YouTube videos marked the 2006 mid-term elections.

As for the 2008 election campaign, it appears that ‘interactive’ conversations with presidential candidates, using new media platforms, are the in-thing.

When, earlier in 2007, CNN and YouTube had collaborated on a formal Democratic debate, YouTube users could submit video questions in advance of the event. In the forthcoming MTV-MySpace ‘dialogues,’ these questions may be submitted live – through either the MySpaceIM instant messaging platform, e-mail, or text messaging.

Jeff Berman, MySpace’s general manager of video operations, said the internet social network is offering participation “through all the tools of new media.”