Ben Wagner – Editor, MTV’s Game Blog

This morning I had a quick but interesting chat with Ben Wagner an MTV editor who has been involved in some interesting citizen journalism projects recently. Also on the call was Stephen Totillo, our video game beat blogger. The three of us discussed the two projects that Stephen would like to attempt (details here).

While nothing has been agreed upon, I can safely say that what Stephen and Ben want in this second, more open project, is to enable a broad range of citizen journalists and video game lovers, with tools that will let them instantly inform Stephen as a reporter. The question, however, is what is the best format to do this?

Twitter has come up – and we have an idea for a use of Twitter’s API which might be built: (think Twitter100 meets Google’s Super-Tuesday Twitter map).

We haven’t committed ourselves to anything yet. First we want to really examine what it is we want to achieve: "A way for readers to swarm around and inform Stephen’s beat," said Wagner.  The tech will come as a solution for that, not as the imputes.