CNN Comes to Second Life

by Surfdaddy Orca

The announcement was not unexpected. As of November 5th, media conglomerate CNN, a division of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., sister to TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, CNN International, and CNN Headline News, will tap residents on the Second Life (SL) grid for news stories that you’ll be able to read on kiosks throughout SL.

CNN will create a variation of its iReports, a real-world vehicle through which average citizens contribute eyewitness reports. CNN will equip Second Life denizens with kits enabling them to transmit copy and photos. According to the Second Life Insider, not-yet-confirmed rumors are circulating that Larry King and other on-air personalities will provide a journalism school, offering guidance to avatar citizen journalists via weekly “news meetings.”

According to C/NET, CNN appears to have told MediaWeek that it is not concerned about how much interesting in-world news there is, since “visitors to the online world include news-making personalities like Newt Gingrich.” In September, The Seventh Sun illustrated the power of SL as a communication vehicle by capturing the attention of news editors around the world with a machinima of Newt Gingrich’s speech in Second Life. Produced by Pollywog Gardenvale, the top-ranked Editor’s Pick YouTube video was viewed over 100,000 times within a week.

What most of the press has missed so far is that CNN’s kiosk strategy has already been successfully deployed throughout the SL grid by PR Newswire. PR Newswire’s SL ambassador, avatar Bruce Voight, explains: “PR Newswire has been here for a while spreading the press releases and announcements that residents give me. We’re established and have been accepted by this wonderful community.” (See the companion article on PR Newswire’s new HUD.)

Some skepticism has already been voiced both inside and outside the SL community about CNN’s plans. Daniel Terdiman of C/NET writes, “... it kind of feels like they are forgetting that there’s already a lot of citizen journalists on the ground in Second Life and they’re just expecting people are going to jump up and down with excitement because CNN’s on the scene.” Similarly, VintFalken.com reports, “I wonder if this [journalism training]—despite the ‘journalism counseling’ will catch on. Reuters is overall accepted as a serious and official news source for Second Life news and residents that wanted to be a reporter could already do so...”

CNN has little to lose in what really amounts to a very small investment in virtual worlds media. While acceptance by the SL community must be earned—and the stories of corporate failures in SL are legendary—it is likely that CNN, like CBS’s CSI:NY, will attract a new generation of residents as well as “real-life journalists” like Larry King and others. Why not study journalism with Larry King in SL? That would look pretty good on a resume.

However, one must look at the example of PR Newswire to see how to lay the operational groundwork to attract long-time residents as “citizen journalists.” Having personally observed the evolution and distribution of the PR Newswire kiosks, I understand the effort it takes to gain traction and trust with the myriad existing tight-knit social communities (and there are many!) within SL. (See past issues of The Seventh Sun at www.TheSeventhSun.com to get a sense of the breadth and variety of activities within these communities.) Acceptance by the SL community, as has often been pointed out, is based on “giving back” to the community.

User-generated news is standard on the 2D web, with millions of bloggers providing interesting stories that sink or swim based on votes—look at digg.com or reddit.com for good examples—and such a model is a good one for the 3D social network of SL. This doesn’t mean that established SL news organizations such as SLNN, the Metaverse Messenger, the SL Insider, the Avastar, or the SL Herald—or monthly news magazines with in-depth articles like The Seventh Sun—will cease to exist because behemoth CNN enters the scene. The same holds true for popular SL bloggers like Wagner James Au, Prokofy Neva, Tateru Nino, and Gwyneth Llewelyn. It is depth of experience, reputation within the community, and quality of writing that distinguish these publications and individuals. And they will continue to be read as long as they are willing to continue to give back to the community in the form of thoughtful and interesting commentary.

Newsstands on a street corner in Second Life

Hopefully CNN, like PR Newswire, can help provide a distribution mechanism to encourage the best of SL writers and also train a new crop of writers. And the SL community will sort through the efforts of new “greenie” journalists by either reading them or ignoring them.

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