The sun shines brightly as I stroll along the curving pier above the water, looking out toward a beautiful island with trees swaying in the wind. There's a looming ampitheater festooned with signs for Thomson Reuters, and a series of concrete buildings that appear ready to hold important meetings. I stride in confidently through the doorway...
You might think I was describing a trip to visit Reuters in the UK, but really, I was strolling through the virtual world of Second Life (SL), visiting the Thomson Reuters island, now largely vacant. The island symbolizes the efforts of media companies not only to cover life in the virtual world of Second Life, but also to live there and set up virtual offices. Reuters made waves by setting up a bureau in SL, with reporters Adam Pasick and Eric Krangel covering stories about the virtual currency and the startup businesses springing up in-world.
But last October, Reuters closed its bureau, and let its specialized blog lapse. CNET and Wired also developed land in Second Life and both have largely abandoned their efforts (though CNET Japan still has an outpost). CNET's Daniel Terdiman, who helped shepherd CNET's presence in SL, still writes about virtual worlds on his blog, Geek Gestalt, but hasn't written specifically about SLfor a year. CNN, however, came later to SL, in late 2007 with its iReport presence, which recently was beefed up to an island where SL users report on their own world as citizen journalists.
How did the media go wrong in coverage -- and participation -- in SSL, and what went right? It was a typical hype-and-backlash scenario, as I detailed in a previous post on MediaShift. Some journalists simply tired of SL, as so many people tried it and then bailed because of its steep learning curve and high technological requirements. But the journalists that have been more enmeshed within the world have been rewarded with plenty of cultural and sociological (and yes, business) stories.
