[Air-l] Journalism & Second Life

[Homero Gil de Zuniga]

Hello all,
This is not one of my areas of expertise but it seems pretty interesting and
I am surprised that it hasn't attracted the attention of anyone in AoIR (I
am sure that many of you know, but I haven't read anything in the list).
Anyway, Reuters, the famous European news agency has decided to "introduce"
a complete news bureau into Second Life. The chief "Adam Reuter" and his
team are going to cover the news that might be of interest in the virtual
community:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologynews&storyID=2
006-10-16T201131Z_01_N15302369_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-SECONDLIFE-REUTERS.xml&WTm
odLoc=NewsArt-C2-NextArticle-1 
This fact raises many questions but to me it sounds as a great strategy: 1)
if Second Life becomes BIG, others would like to follow but Reuters might
have become the main "news" distributor by that time in the virtual world.
2) If Second Life does not get that far, Reuters still makes a great
publicity out of it in both worlds.
In parallel, I also think that many other interesting points emerge from
this action. For instance, what are the real implications of it? Is each
time the real world more and more alike the offline world? And if so, what
does it mean, for instance, is someone ever going to be able to make a
profitable life in the "real" world because he/she is famous in the virtual
world?
HGZ