The goal for the show is to engage young adults in politics. “Independent” is slated to “air” on MySpace News next year, after MySpace’s presidential primaries.

Fortunately, this news doesn’t end there. The producer is Mark Burnett, aka the father of reality TV. What does that mean for “Independent”? From what I’ve pieced together, viewers will vote on the best campaigners—not the candidates themselves, but MySpacers who upload videos about their campaign efforts on behalf of one of the candidates, but I’m not sure. Deduce for yourself:

MySpace users and TV viewers will select from a pool of candidates who have uploaded audition videos to the site.

MySpace users who support specific candidates are encouraged to publicize or campaign for the candidate by creating online videos and by employing other online marketing tactics. . . .

Each week, Internet and TV viewers will vote on new missions that players must accomplish. The missions are related to issues raised by the MySpace community.

They can range from how to take action on issues such as whether a new Wal-Mart outlet should be welcomed to a small local town to whether a new factory or housing development could threaten the ecology of the local creek. . . .

One winner will earn $1 million to spend on launching a new political party, donating to a political cause or entering the U.S. presidential race.

(Reminder to potential contestants contemplating entering this contest to get the $1M for your own campaign: to be President of the United States, you have to be 35. Says so in the Constitution. Also, you must have been born in the US and lived in the US for the last 14 years.)

They’re still looking for a TV network for the television component. Yeah, MySpace is owned by News Corp, which also owns FOX broadcasting, which has more than a dozen cable and broadcast television channels, including FOX, where Burnett’s two latest creations run. I guess they’re holding out for a “real” broadcast network.

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According to the LA Times…

The stories will consist of a headline, one paragraph and a link to the full piece on the news site or blog where it originated. Sources will be selected on criteria including the number of links to them and how often the material is updated.

MySpace parent, News Corp., hopes the more structured content will help it attract more advertisers to MySpace, who thus far, have been put off from advertising next to the random ramblings of teenagers.

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington reveals MySpace News is built on Newroo technology – a company they acquired for $7m in 2006. He also has more on how MySpace News will work…

Like Google news, MySpace news will pull news items from a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds. The news items will then be organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories including sports, politics, style, and technology. The order of the news items will be determined by user voting, taking into account the freshness of the news. Users can vote on each item of news with a ranking of 1-5. Higher ranked and higher voted items will appear at the top of each category.

TechCrunch also has some screenshots, like this one…

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