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As for the person who will present this new venture, Ms. Chung, a 25-year-old model and television personality in Britain, sounded so relaxed in a recent telephone interview that serious questioning seemed almost rude. Speaking in the equivalent of a Facebook status update, she said she was “eating some pasta, feeling pretty content,” clearly straining her voice after a night of karaoke that ended, according to her tweets, at 7 a.m.
Her karaoke standbys, by the way — which should be familiar to any of the more than 17,000 people following her tweets — include Nickelback’s “This Is How You Remind Me,” Kylie Minogue’s “Better the Devil You Know” and lately, Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire.”
“It’s a lovely one to do,” she said.
Ms. Chung has spent the past three years hosting programs for Channel 4 in Britain about music and popular culture, and she is a regular presence in the European celebrity press, most recently appearing on the cover of the May issue of Harper’s Bazaar in Britain alongside the headline, “This Year’s Girl.”
She auditioned for the MTV talk show about a year ago, and her hip attitude and sometimes wacky lines of questioning appealed to the MTV producers.
“She’s able to infuse everything with her own take,” said Corin Nelson, the executive producer.
While Ms. Chung (whose father is Chinese and mother, British) had expressed a yearning to live in New York, “cracking the U.S., as it were, wasn’t on my agenda,” she said, adding that “people in London are obsessed with Brits breaking America.”
“People in America keep asking me — and I think it’s quite an American mindset — what my long-term game plan is,” she continued. “That’s not the way I think.”
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The audience for “TRL” had been declining for years, and that it lasted 12 years speaks to the difficulty in replacing it. Ms. Chung, untouched by much nostalgia for what was once an MTV mainstay, remarked that YouTube has “rendered those shows kind of archaic.” She also mentioned that MTV executives “get a bit sensitive” when “TRL” comes up. (According to the network the only thing the two shows have in common is the studio location.)
And how do you fill an hour of live teenage TV without music videos? With “inane banter,” Ms. Chung joked. “Mindless chitchat. Hilarious interviews.” The format will typically include a pop culture and news update, a comedy segment, celebrity interviews and what Ms. Nelson called an “Internet discovery.” Theoretically some of those discoveries — viral videos, Web stars, and LOL-worthy photos — will come from viewers, who will be able to submit them online.
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As for Ms. Chung’s online persona, her short communiqués on Twitter seem written solely for the three-dozen people she follows through the site. In essence she uses the forum not to broadcast self-promotional patter but to talk to her friends the way her fans do. But she said she prefers Facebook. “It’s just quite self-centered, isn’t it?” she said of Twitter. “You have to be quite confident that you’re very interesting in order for it to work.”
Yet there she was last Sunday upon arrival in New York, posting onto Twitter via her BlackBerry about her lost luggage and a three-hour flight delay and her unfortunate decision to watch the film “He’s Just Not That Into You” on the plane.
“I will always regret that decision,” she wrote in her tweet.
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