Gabi Gregg the new MTV’s Twitter correspondent
August 11, 2010 by TweetWonder
Filed under Twitter News
MTV’s newly-minted “TJ” Gabi Gregg may be a fresh hire, but she’s already hit the ground running. The 23-year-ancient fashion blogger landed the primo gig Sunday night as MTV’s Twitter-based correspondent, and since then it’s been “very overwhelming — but in a excellent way!” she said in a phone interview she squeezed in between Tweeting, moving, and doing other press.
MTV approached Gregg a few months ago to compete in the “Follow Me” web-based contest that culminated in a televised finale on Sunday. Gregg and other social-media-savvy would-be stars proved their web prowess, but only one could snag the $100,000 and year-long gig as the behind-the-scenes correspondent for all things MTV. Gregg says she was “confused” when MTV first questioned her to participate, “but after they clarified what my job would be, I was super excited. And the salary didn’t hurt.”
Gregg made Young, Stout & Fabulous after graduating from college in 2008. “I hadn’t found a job that I loved, and I wanted to pursue fashion journalism,” she says. She’d been maintaining a personal LiveJournal “since high school,” but YFF was her first real foray into the expansive blogosphere. She sees it as more than a outfit-a-day outlet, too: “It has a message beyond fashion, about accepting yourself at any size, and feeling stylish.”
Plus the clothes are but one aspect of her personality. “Fashion’s just one side of me, but it’s certainly not my only interest. I like pop culture,” she says. Her new gig as MTV’s first TJ will certainly help foster that like. Though the specifics of the gig are still up in the air (on her MTV.com blog, she acknowledges that there “is a ton of room for experimentation”), in general she will be MTV fans’ eyes and ears to how the network operates, blogging and tweeting the on-the-scene experiences with an emphasis on dialogue. Want a hint as to what to expect? She cites ?uestlove’s Twitter stream as the gold standard of fan interaction.
“I meet people [through Twitter] that I’d never have the opportunity to know,” she says. “It’s been a fantastic way to give and get feedback from my readers, for blogging in between posts — when I got started, I had no thought how cool it was.”