[Air-l] Journalism & Second Life

[Jill Walker]

Reuters opening a brand in Second Life? Wow. I wonder how they'll  
compare to the Second Life Herald (http://www.secondlifeherald.com) -  
which certainly has a very different tone to it than Reuters does to  
their news releases, although Second Life Herald has also broken  
important news. Below, the text from their "About" page

Jill Walker
Associate Professor
Dept of Humanistic Informatics
University of Bergen
http://jilltxt.net

----
About the Second Life Herald

The Second Life Herald was founded on October 23, 2003, by philosophy  
professor Peter Ludlow. Its mission, as described the next day, was  
to observe, record and study "the legal, social, and economic  
implications" of life in the virtual world. Originally established as  
the Alphaville Herald and reporting for the most part on life on the  
Alphaville server of The Sims Online, the Herald soon branched out  
into coverage of other massively multiplayer online games and virtual  
worlds -- helped along by the murder of Herald publisher Urizenus  
(Ludlow's avatar) after Electronic Arts got wind of the stories the  
newspaper was printing about the scams and cyber-prostitution that  
were taking place within its game, and the company's indifference to  
reports of real-world violence.

EA's termination of Ludlow's account made international headlines,  
but only stiffened the Herald's resolve to pay witness to the  
societies that were emerging in this new corner of cyberspace. In  
June 2004, the newspaper was reborn as the Second Life Herald, under  
the managment of the resurrected Urizenus Sklar, and began  
concentrating more closely on the virtual world of Second Life. In  
January 2005, the avatar Walker Spaight -- the online representative  
of journalist Mark Wallace -- joined the paper as Editorial Director.  
On Urizenus's retirement from the virtual Fourth Estate one year  
later, Walker stepped up to the helm.

In the more than two years of the Herald's existence, it has gained a  
reputation as one of the hardest-hitting news sources covering  
virtual worlds. Unflinching both in its taste for a dramatic story  
and its demand that those who govern virtual worlds do so fairly, the  
Herald is often called a muckraking tabloid or worse, but its loyal  
readers (numbering several thousand per day) love -- and often love  
to hate -- the unique service it provides: to take a good, close,  
often snarky look at the online worlds that are becoming a more and  
more important part of everyone's offline lives.

> 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
>
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