LAWRENCE, Kan. - Secondlife.com has become a host to over nine million people since its creator Richard Linden introduced the online community. Today if features stock brokers, real estate agents, street vendors, and even journalists to cover "in-world" stories. Journalists in second life face an entirely different way of finding and reporting information because they are essentially a media within a larger media.
From a recent interview on SLCN.TV entitled "Playing Blogher in SL - Covering a Virtual World", it's evident that even though the technology is there for journalists, the economy of second life isn't up to par. "It's more of a slightly paid hobby", says CybergrrlOh, a new struggling in-world journalist. However, that doesn't mean that journalists aren't taking their jobs seriously, "It's not a game, it's a real space", states CybergrrlOh ,"The news I'm covering, is real news".
Whether the mass media are necessary in second life is debatable. The television and radio stations within second life are still reaching a relatively small demographic of people, and a very specific niche of the global population as well. Starr Sonic of SLCN.TV sums up the potential of these media well, "For every human endeavor, there in interest in others", she says. So it can be said that even though the media of second life aren't making a huge impact yet, as more and more users log onto second life, they are in turn enhancing the value of the reporting agencies within second life.
One great advantage of second life journalism is the time frame of information. While news crews in the real world scramble to the scene of breaking news, second life journalists teleport and fly to the scene in fractions of seconds. The only question is whether in-world stories are important enough for this to be a breakthrough in journalism. Presently, in-world journalists are paving the roads for in-world journalists in the future. If second life sees the explosion of users that it wants in the future, the in-world journalism community could find themselves way ahead of the curve.