An Audience of Producers

Looks like USAToday.com is getting the idea with participatory content. In this contest, readers are encouraged to produce their own humorous “Super Bowl TV commercials” and send them in. Winners will have their entries published on USAToday.com. (Couldn’t the editors come up with an additional prize?) This is such an obvious thing — what with digital video cameras and video-editing software now in the hands of so many people — that more media websites should be copying this. Political activists understand the power of the user-content/participatory journalism movement. MoveOn.org, for example, has a “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest that solicited home-made anti-George Bush commercials. Some of the entries to that contest are quite good. (Thanks to Lost Remote for the tip.)