Not to be outdone by CNN’s iReport, Fox News has launched its own citizen journalist platform, creatively titled… UReport. The effort was made possible by a partnership with MySpace, which has offered its social networking services to Fox for UReport’s usage: MySpace users can join the uReport community and create their own news content, which then has the chance to be featured exclusively on Fox News. If you like your journalism painfully biased, but you know, also somehow “fair and balanced,” you can resurrect your defunct MySpace account and help out poor old Fox News.

But UReport has a few interesting implications. Firstly, it’s another example of huge news organizations reaching out to the little people to aid in the reporting process. Much like the New York Times’ The Local, UReport relies solely on untrained reporters to garner news that can then be combed and edited by seasoned journalists. UReport grants Fox a whole new team of journalists that they don’t have to pay! (Ugh.)

The other bizarre facet to this is the network’s decision to team up with MySpace. While both corporations are owned by News Corp, it’s interesting that UReport would choose such an irrelevant social media platform. For MySpace, it seems like the perfect deal; the site could use more legitimacy, and anyone who would want to partake in this project would most likely have to create a new account, or at least reactivate the one they haven’t used in months. It seems unlikely that those still in their MySpace phase—14 year old Midwestern girls and the old guys trolling the site for 14 year old Midwestern girls—would be at all interested in the project. But we’ll just have to wait and see.

If any of you decide to participate in UReport, let us know how it works out. On the bright side, perhaps a horde of citizen journalists will indeed help make Fox News actually “fair and balanced.”

[via TechCrunch]