[ARTICLE] Journalism Grows Inside Virtual Worlds

An article where Hamlet Linden gets interviewed for a change!
Read the "Journalism Grows Inside Virtual Worlds" article here.

First GOM, now newspapers. Great.

a good read.. and inspiring as well. maybe i should consider writing my own blog of sorts..

i mean, i know there's SL:UT, but that's not really my flavor. i'm leaving that to The Quirk. but, i could see writing a little here and there as a feature on my website (which will also lead to the SL:UT pages).

anyhoo, i'm enjoying the validity that Second Life is garnering for itself outside of our corner of the virtual universe.

New World Notes has been around forever - I like to print it out , mainly because I find the content very *absorbent*.

This post is so 2004.

calling currency exchange a "virtual black market" kind of gives SL a "virtual black eye."

NWN offers something different than the M2 does. When I started the M2, I did so because I saw that there was nothing in SL that filled that partuicular niche. With a Linden sponsored site, that pays writers a high wage for articles, I'm really worried about the effect this will have on my business.

Katt I love M2. I don't see NWN as competition and it isn't actually going to change much. Hamlet has signed a book deal and won't have time to write NWN anymore. It's unlikely that they are going to turn the whole NWN site into an uber-newspaper (which M2 is). Infact I expect it won't change at all, except for the fact that the less than daily articles will be written by someone else (possibly a few different someone elses).

I don't see this as any additional competition at all. Actually I think as more people read M2, it's going to put LL in a difficult position in regard to keeping Hamlet on the payroll.

Furthermore as your readership goes up, so will advertising rates and writer salaries. Then LL won't be able to compete with what you are paying. All of Hamlet's press and push for people to take virtual reporters for real, is a good thing for M2.

Thanks for the calming voice of reason LOL I needed it.

heheh Katt, I agree with Satchmo. I was also in Hamlet's SLCC session, and while he mentioned that he was looking for stringers, this really wasn't positioned as a massive expansion of NWN. His did not indicate that his criteria for what to cover and what not to cover was going to change, and obviously, there is a LOT that NWN can't cover.

And that's why we read you!

Well, yes and no. It's the topics that Hamlet sometimes covers, and the perspective from which he covers them, that keep him from being just a PR flack.

How "evocative" his work is? That's just damned good writing.



So shopping is now a project? Good thing I have several subcommittees to arrange my "Whoa, I gotta get me that new tattoo!" agenda. And some wonder why I keep this slider coif? Because I can't get any traction with the Memory Harker Board Of Hoochie Hair Acquisitions, is why.

I mean: puh-leaze.




Hee! Euterpe, are they talking about *us*?



Go, Hamlet, go!

Um . . . Katt, I agree with your first reaction.

Plus - $6-12 k per article? Man, that would almost get ME to write for them.

Knowing the overall look and content of both Hamlet's page and your newspaper, however, I much prefer your newspaper.

I wish the Lindens would not go into the same businesses as people in the game. Don't they have enough to do?

coco

Katt, I have absolutely no interest in employing Resident stringers in a way that competes with your publication, or any other Resident-run publication. Like I told the Publish.com dude, this is still way in the planning phase, and I'm not gonna have time to hit it much at all until after the Barnett thing is put to bed, but for now, I can mention some basic points:

- Stringer stories will be run, at most, once or twice a week. Probably even less. I'll still be writing the bulk of NWN, even when I begin the book version in earnest.
- Like all Resident work created in SL (even if it's just typed out in a Notecard, in this case), Residents will retain the rights to their writing that's run in NWN. So it's totally OK-- even encouraged-- for a stringer's story to also be re-published in another blog or in-world publication.
- My main goal with this is to foster more writing about SL, by SL Residents, not less. For that very reason, I want stringers to promote Resident blogs and/or in-world publications they write for, whenever possible, with co-publication deals, for example, or links to blogs/websites in the author biography, as another example.

Hope this clarifies things-- IM or e-mail me for more details. (As I encourage everyone interested in writing to do.)

<blush>

So there you go. M2 journalists can provide "teasers" for the upcoming issue of M2, and get paid in the process. On top of that you get to promote M2 to the 5 people who are reading NWN*

* awww, Hammy you know I love you... I'm one of those 5.

so just some questions:

If NWN is going book form, does LL get the copyright and/or royalties from that? There was a professor at the university where I work who did 20 yrs research on a book, and because his research and writing was done "on the job", the university started a big fuss about copyright...he ended up cutting a deal where he kept the copyright, but the university got all royalties.

Also, I think there's a difference between NWN and M2, in that M2 covers breaking news relevant to a specific week while NWN mostly is features of specific residents and issues that could take months or weeks of interviews to write about...features vs. hard news...? I am probably wrong, I blink a lot and miss what's going on

Thanks for the clarification, Hamlet. I guess part of my panic is because, after 36 years, I have finally found what I love to do. Sometimes it seems too good to be true.