CNN Creates Citizen Journalists for Second life

Reuters embedded a reporter in Second Life last year, but CNN wants to send hundreds, or even thousands, out running through the virtual world. In a spin on its i-Reports program, a system for non-reporters to submit eye witness reports and recordings, CNN will distribute  kits to Second Life residents enabling them to record and send  photos and text. Non-reporters will be able to pick up their news through CNN kiosks scattered throughout the world. "We looked at what are people doing [in Second Life] that is meaningful to what we do,"  Susan Grant, Executive VP of CNN News Services told MediaWeek. "I love that we don't have to take things from the real world and force them in."

While news sites like Second Life Herald and Second Life News Network, just to name a couple of examples, seem to have luck drawing reporters from the resident pool, it hasn't worked as well for major media outlets. Sky News ran a similar project to CNN's, but only as a month-long contest. And Liveplanet created GridWorldNews.com and Azerothwn.com to cover the worlds of Second Life and World of Warcraft with a wide range of amateur writers, but it looks like the most recent post on GridWorldNews is from October 4.

It looks like CNN, though, will be following that old adage for branding in virtual worlds: get and stay involved. It will offer weekly news meetings with CNN staffers and even training sessions with CNN personalities like Larry King.

But CNN has only put in a "very little investment," according to Grant, The main goal is to learn about how to deal with virtual worlds.

"I don't think we are betting the whole farm on it," she said. "It's one aspect of many ways we are engaging with users."

Comments

[Reuben Steiger]

We've worked with CNN throughout this project and are eagerly awaiting its unveiling -- we think it will be both well received and a very useful service to the community at large.

[Prokofy Neva]

This project's status as "not lame" awaits proof.

I've raised quite a few questions about the notion of i-Reporter, which abdicates editorial judgement even as it infantilizes residents -- here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/cnn-launches-sa.html

I've been able to post a critical story about LL and the massive denial-of-service attacks this weekend, today here after waiting 5 hours in the CNN scrub line:
http://secondlife.blogs.cnn.com/2007/11/13/linden-governance-team-meets-with-angry-residents/
I encourage others to do the same!

Reuters has done a pretty good job of getting both the inworld and outworld stories of Second Life. Eric Reuters spends a lot of time doing reporting the old-fashioned way, walking the beat inworld and even outworld and spending long hours on investigative reporting and culling through sources' chat logs.

There really isn't any kind of substitute for that sort of hard journalistic slog in Second Life. CNN can have lots of amateurs file happy little biz and edu stories with only photos and their captions, but that's a dreadful way to approach the overall problem of the black box of Second Life. In fact, it augurs ill for the future, if corporate media merges with virtuality to create synthetic news spaces devoid of criticism of technology and its makers.

CNN and others should treat SL as they would a story at the White House or in Pakistan and behave accordingly.

It's also not a good idea for news media to be parked on ad agency islands like Millions of Us, even if Reuben will likely be sophisticated about this relationship and hopefully not try to spin CNN coverage of his clients.

But we've found a stark lack of willingness of the MOU builders and engineers to really take a look at the problem of griefing so as to prevent the kind of thing that happened to CNET when interviewing Anshe on an MOU island. That means stop imagining that these builds are to exist for geeky aestheticism only.

Put autoreturn on, my God, that's just the basics! That means set the land so that non-group scripts, builds and object insertion do not work.

Again, a basic 101 lesson in island maintenance: no, turning off *non-group* scripts doesn't *at all* mean that your guests can't access your notecard givers, HUDs, interactive displays, etc. They can! You set them to *your* group but anyone can click on them and operate them. They just can't rez out *their own disruptive scripts and objects*.