LEWISTON – Jaime McLeod grew up loving MTV.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the music television station was a favorite stop for entertainment, for pop culture, for news.

With its state-of-the-art mix of music and video, MTV got her interested in multimedia.

With its revolutionary youth vote campaigns – namely the celebrated appearance of 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton – MTV got her interested in politics.

“It was cool. You’d never seen anything like it before,” she said.

Now McLeod, a 31-year-old Lewiston writer, will help rejuvenate media and politics for the next MTV generation.

She’s been chosen as Maine’s representative for MTV’s “Street Team ’08,” a specially recruited group of 51 citizen-journalists who will use everything from laptops to cell phones to cover the 2008 race for president. The goal: Bring politics to young people using their media, from their perspective and with a focus on their communities.

“I’m going to have a little more freedom to go outside those traditional journalistic boundaries and cover some things that have excited me about Maine over the years,” said McLeod.

MTV created “Street Team ’08” with a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a private entity dedicated to promoting and improving journalism.

The Knight News Challenge awarded 17 grants to kick-start innovative ideas that used digital media. MTV’s citizen journalist proposal was one of the largest, covering all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

“We’re very much focused on making MTV a megaphone for the issues that young people care about most and allowing them to get the word out,” said Jason Rzepka, an MTV spokesman.

MTV began looking for its 51 citizen journalists earlier this year. McLeod, who has a master’s degree in journalism, saw the ad while trolling Craigslist for freelance work. She didn’t really think she had a chance, but “I said ‘Oh, what the heck. Why not?'”

McLeod wasn’t sure if she had the multimedia experience MTV was looking for, but she had the journalism experience. She wrote for three weekly newspapers in Pennsylvania before becoming a reporter for The Forecaster, a Falmouth-based weekly that is part of Sun Media Group, a parent company of the Sun Journal. She has also worked as a freelance reporter for the Sun Journal, as well as various magazines, weekly newspapers and Web sites.

Nationally, about 600 people applied for the 51 spots. MTV narrowed the pack with interviews, essay questions and a sample video news report.

In November, McLeod was chosen to be Maine’s correspondent. The news surprised McLeod, who thought her sample video – a narrated, documentary-style look at the impact of Somali immigration in Lewiston – was too “amateurish” for MTV.

“I guess they saw something good in it,” she said.

MTV will give McLeod and the 50 other citizen journalists laptops, video cameras, memory cards, flash drives and editing software. They’ll receive multimedia, reporting and ethics training at MTV’s New York City headquarters the second week of January. Throughout 2008, they will each file at least one video, photo or audio news item a week, uploading them to www.think.mtv.com and making them available to cell phones users.

Each of the 51 correspondents will focus on how the presidential election impacts issues important to young people in their own community. McLeod plans to focus on social and racial issues, human rights and the war in Iraq, among other things. She expects most of her work will be documentary-style, highlighting people and their stories. But don’t expect a VJ-like presentation. She’ll most often be behind the camera, not in front of it.

“I don’t see myself as a (news) anchor,” she said.

McLeod, who currently works as a copywriter for Geiger in Lewiston and is a contributing editor for Geiger’s Farmers’ Almanac, will not give up her day job. But working for MTV, she said, won’t be bad for her future.

“It’s a hell of a resume-builder, that’s for sure,” she said.

McLeod’s Street Team page can be found at http://think.mtv.com/jmcleod76/ or through www.think.mtv.com.