Wanna Be a VJ

Wanna Be a VJ was a show and contest on MTV in the USA. Contestants were selected from the crowd around MTV's Times Square office, and narrowed down via challenges testing the applicants' music knowledge and personality. Once narrowed down to six contestants, viewers were allowed to vote for contestants by telephone and on the Internet. The winner was awarded $25,000 and a one-year contract to be a veejay on Total Request Live. All three events were hosted by Carson Daly.

Wanna Be a VJ (1998)

In the first Wanna Be a VJ contest, the tall, spacey Jesse Camp beat the more knowledgeable but less flamboyant Dave Holmes. However, MTV extended job offers to both men, and Holmes ended up being more popular than Camp in the long run, hosting various shows on MTV until 2001.

Camp's unexpected victory caused many viewers to suspect foul play. The Village Voice ran an article in which a source, identified only by his online handle "UglyPig", claimed to have hacked the voting site, allowing him to vote more than 3,000 times.

Wanna Be a VJ Too (1999)

The second Wanna Be a VJ contest was won by 21-year old Thalia DaCosta, from Sunrise, Florida.

Wanna Be a VJ 3 (2000)

The third Wanna Be a VJ contest was won by Ray Munns.

Munns went on to defend his job fives times on a live show entitled TRL Presents: VJ for a Day, where he and the contestants introduced the eleven through fifteen videos of TRL. Ray was the first ever half-Korean VJ (he is also a quarter-Irish and a quarter-English) and was the first contest winner to stay longer than a year at MTV.

The runner up, Shannon Wiseman of Dallas, North Carolina, became a co-host for UPN's Atlanta Tonight in 2004 and the host of NASCAR.COM's Post-Race Show in 2005.

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