Real World Press in Virtual Worlds
Materials related to this program are now compiled here.
This Monday, February 18th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST) Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host members of the press to discuss the topic, "Real World Press in Virtual Worlds."
Our guests will include:
1. Eric Reuters of Reuters Press. Eric Krangel is a journalist with expertise in technology, social networking, the open source movement, and virtual reality. He reports for the Reuters Second Life Bureau from within the virtual world under the byline "Eric Reuters." He also writes for NewAssignment.net, attends Columbia Journalism School part-time, and freelance stories to major magazines. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the Chicago Tribune, the Montreal Gazette, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
2. John Jainschigg, Executive Director of CMP Metaverse, a division of multimedia publisher CMP, whose portfolio includes InformationWeek, Dr. Dobb's, Web 2.0, Black Hat, Game Developer Expo, WorldsInMotion and other business-to-business media properties. John established a beach-head for CMP in Second Life in mid-2006, and in early 2007 launched Life 2.0 Summit - a global virtual event on metaverse development and business. The upcoming Life 2.0 Summit Spring event, March 15-21, will host over 2000 enterprise software architects, web developers and executives, inworld and via realtime video on the web (register at www.life20.net).
3. Rhonda Lowry, Vice President of Emerging Technologies at Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
4. Prokofy Neva, real estate mogul and founder of the virtual worlds blog, SecondThoughts. Among other accomplishments, Prokofy was named 2005 Avatar of the Year by the SL Herald.
Cornell Professor Robert Bloomfield will moderate a discussion about the role of news organizations in virtual worlds, with topics including:
- Why are mainstream news organizations active in SL?
- What is 'big media' looking for in Second Life?
- How are news organizations building a presence in Second Life? (e.g. CNN's iReport.)
- What can it bring to the table for the Second Life community and economy?
- What can we say about the ecology of 'corporate' vs. 'citizens'' media as it evolves to cover the virtual worlds space?
One more topic for discussion
Steve's post mentions "What can [real world media] bring to the table for the Second Life community and economy?"
There is another side to this: what will real world media not bring to the table...in particular, how effective will RL media be in "speaking to power?" The Society for Professional Journalism Code of Ethics does include the following item:
Prokofy has quite closely to this element of the code. But I think it is worth asking how effective the more profit-seeking groups will do so, given the importance of their existing brands and the relative unimportance of Second Life to their larger organizations.
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