Think MTV's Street Team '08 once again puts MTV News at the leading edge of election news coverage. I have long been a fan of MTV News and its coverage of electoral politics. Back in the early '90's, while I was researching presidential use of television to manipulate public opinion for my dissertation, I was an avid viewer of MTV News. Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren were doing some really edgy stuff, from gathering college students into a Boston University auditorium to measure their real-time reactions to the presidential debates, to Tabitha Soren interviewing George H.W. Bush on the back platform of a moving train the Sunday before election day (who could forget Poppy referring to "MTV afficionados," showing how completely disconnected he was from young voters?), MTV offered a new breed of television news.

And that tradition continues on today, as MTV News migrates most of its news programming online, including the beta site Think MTV. Think MTV's foray into election news coverage is an ambitious project called Street Team '08. MTV has recruited and hired 51 amateur journalists to blog about the election. 51, as in one for every state plus one for DC. Supervising Producer of Street Team '08 Michael Scogin talks more about the project here:

I'd just as soon not bring this up, as I've probably had beers with most of the people involved with this topic. But I feel that the cause of good, solid reporting on what Presidential eCampaignmeisters is worth setting the record straight.

Jonathan Martin brings up MittTV as an interesting example of Mitt going around the "media filter," a la HillaryHub. This isn't the first time I've seen MittTV signed out in writeups of Romney's website, and every time I have to ask, "Why?"

What is MittTV? It's Mitt Romney's videos on his website, draped in a custom player and a zingy name. But who isn't posting videos to the Web and YouTube? A number of candidates are even using their name and "TV" in the branding! Here's BarackTV and Hillary TV. Now, Romney's folks have been more aggressive about posting news clips of their guy to their YouTube channel, which is just smart strategy, but that's about the only differentiator to this that I can see.

Meanwhile, another worthwhile Romney effort, the Sign Up America campaign which signed up 30,000 supporters in 24 hours, didn't get as much play in the media. But over the long run, it's stuff like this -- the boring game of inches of recruiting volunteers and donors -- that has the greater impact.