MySpace is partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a citizen journalism contest this year. One lucky MySpace user can win a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for the event later this month, along with a press pass, Congress and Media Center access, and syndication of their MySpace blog via WSJ.com. See here for details.
Some may think that a partnership between MySpace and WSJ seems a bit odd, but this isn’t MySpace’s first crack at promoting citizen journalism with an established new source, as the social network has teamed with NBC on similar initiatives. Given the nature of the Forum and the fact that MySpace and the WSJ are under he same corporate umbrella, it even appears that News Corp. is attempting to overlap some of the user activity and readership of both MySpace and the WSJ.
With YouTube already having taken the leap from social networking to citizen journalism, especially during election season last year, MySpace is doing what it can to have ongoing measures for competing against the video network that has one of the largest collections of user-generated content on the web. YouTube is even participating for the second time in a citizen journalism contest specific to the World Economic Forum, giving users a really unique opportunity to get involved with one of the more prominent forums in the world.
So will these kinds of citizen journalism efforts pay off? They’ve seemed to work well in the past, giving social media users a great way of interjecting their opinions and thoughts in larger concepts that pervade our political, economic and artistic culture. And given the downward turn that printed media has taken, much of News Corp.’s publications are in dire need of some form of revitalization. There’s no harm in turning to a heavily populated social network for some interjection, and this may even be a long-term tactic for the modification of traditional media in general.
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