shelbinator.com

I’m back from my wintry travels, trying to re-acclimate to my graduate studies, and trying to figure out once again this whole work-life balance going forward.

And I’m still hacking up small bits of lung that withered and died in the single-digit Iowa air.

I’ve even gotten all my new cables, connectors, and tiny gizmos sorted and stored in individually marked plastic zip-top bags, which I think will be a key element of carrying around the one-person television production studio in my new backpack and not leaving anything behind when the story is done.

Last Monday night, I met my 50 other Street Team ‘08 cohorts and got quite a bit of pep talk from the president of MTV, the VP of MTV News, and our new producers. After loading us up with wine and snacks, they loaded us up with enough gear to make a U.S. Marine remember boot camp and sent us back to the hotel. There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.

Day one of orientation started off with more legal jargon than you could shake a stick at, and right off the bat I believe we covered what will in retrospect be discussed with great scrutiny when the evolution-of-media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Leonard Witt start the autopsy on MTV and the Knight Foundation’s grand journalistic experiment of 2008. While the press release sang proudly that 51 “citizen journalists” had been hired to cover the election from the local level on up, we have now become something else. Like that catch-22 of quantum mechanics which prevents you from measuring a system without irrevocably altering it, so does hiring a citizen journalist make them not-so-much-a-citizen journalist. Whether that makes us “real” journalists is also a dubious suggestion: if you see me trying to elbow my way through the mainstream press at the John Edwards rally at the IBEW this weekend, take note of just how many of the people with cameras go chasing after every interviewee with a release form to sign. That would be me.

Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.

So we’ll just see how this goes. I’m sure I’ll become quite deft, before long, at effortlessly obtaining all the signatures and knowing how to shoot the story to avoid too many hurdles in the first place. But it is hard for me, as someone whose role in politics has been, most of the time, to jump up and down and yell “You’re doing it wrong!” about this new media thingamajig in the hope of improving people’s methods, to just ignore that aspect of it. The evolution of media seems to be about relinquishing great degrees of control, which is naturally very scary to the old guard, and the extent to which each organization decides to loosen up on the grip is a big element of how their new forays online pan out. Thus any concern I have about importing old world constraints into new media ventures only arises out of my desire for this whole project to kick ass and take names. I really will be curious to see what the Rosen-Jarvis-Witt types say about this whole model. Hell, I’m curious to see what you think of the operation so far, so why don’t you go poke around and opine about it?

We actually got to hear from Jay Rosen, a co-organizer of my old Off the Bus beat at Huffington Post, on day two. He got us all fired up about thinking about our national versus local beats, and thankfully fired off the occasional chastisement at our new employers to make sure they gave us all the tools we need for this to truly be a new media operation. RSS feeds? Yes plzkthx! (Our blogs and media channels currently lack them…but it’s planned, don’t worry.) Surprise, surprise, my “national beat” — or the overarching theme that will hopefully tie into, and at times stand in for, local Georgia reporting — will be science and technology. We’ll see what kind of prayer I have of making sense out of that.

Legal protocols of videography aside, the overarching message of the whole trip was what an awesome platform we’re setting out to create and how excited our backers (oh, and we the Street Team, too) are about our prospects. Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation told us about pitching the idea of giving a Knight News Challenge Grant to MTV of all networks, and his enthusiasm for the project was infectious, even through some of our hangovers. Just hearing about the hope some very serious backers have for us was a wake-up call for how we’re not in YouTube anymore, Toto.

We also got a great send-off from Keven Roach, executive producer of AP’s online video network, Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for the AP and now their online political editor. Selected pieces of ours will be distributed over the AP’s online network to over 1,800 member sites, which is a huge platform for us and quite the incentive to produce that noteworthy video clip — and they couldn’t have been more excited about this whole venture either (even if it was somewhat muted by 36 straight sleepless hours of New Hampshire primary coverage). It was quite reassuring to get such optimistic words from someone so credible, but we were also warned that with much attention will come much scrutiny, and we’d better thicken up our skin for the inevitable criticism. Ron even brought some advice from other heavy hitters, in the form of a video he compiled while in Des Moines, IA, of advice for us newbies from the likes of Tim Russert, Sam Donaldson, and Andrea Mitchell.

Yeah, I think that was about the time it really sank in what a holy-shit step this was in my online career. Thank God Sen. Biden told me I’d better finish my dissertation at the end of the campaign. Thank Joe Biden, says my mother.

The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it is MTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”

She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.

I do still need your help fleshing out my local beat. If you’ve got a story — and you’re willing to sign a Guest Release, damnit — get in touch. There’s a contact link right up at the top of this page. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a notebook with my dissertation thoughts in it somewhere under all this video gear.