I’ve been an online journalist before, for CBR News. But never like this:
Reuters is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life this week, joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the internet.
Starting Wednesday, Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life for real world readers who visit the Reuters news site.
Hey, Reuters: When you get around to hiring someone to cover World of Warcraft from the inside, let me know. I’ll even name my online reporter avatar Reuters. (Reuters sounds kind of like a gnome mage, doesn’t it?)
Back in May, I wrote a story about potential predators on MySpace, inspired by a Wired news story on the subject.
Well, Wired has done a follow-up, actually catching a convicted sex offender by running a program off-site. MySpace officials say that they — with direct access to the servers and databases — can’t do the same thing.
The mind reels.
Election time is stressful for me; I’ve already put in for a vacation for Thanksgiving week. (I’d hoped that The Burning Crusade might be released then, so I could fully geek out and decompress, but I suspect it won’t be released that week after all.)
Every election cycle, I turn into Public Enemy #1 with at least a portion of the readers. This week, I had a supporter of one of the incumbent school board members come into the office and express his extreme displeasure at length and in no uncertain terms, and I have a feeling that next week, supporters of the teachers union candidates might offer a similar point of view.
It’s been worse, of course: In 2004, the supporters of two different city council candidates demanded that I be fired.
Everyone tells me that, if everyone’s mad at me for my political coverage, I’m probably doing a good job, and they might be right. But it sure doesn’t feel that way. And yes, it’s the job I signed up for; there’s no draft for reporters, far from it.
Thank goodness elections only take place on even years.
An unplanned side effect of going to the new format at the Hesperia Star site is that it’s boosted my story count quite a bit. I turned in 10 stories this week, including some my usual length, and others shorter and more in line with a Daily Press story. My only goal was to make sure there was new news every weekday, to give a reason for people to come back and to get those ad-counters spinning.
After getting spammed the second day, we haven’t seen any since, although I expect to get more soon.
At the city council meeting this week, I ran into a few people who had already seen that we were five days a week online. And they’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and soon, everyone will be using Prell shampoo. (I think it was Prell.)
You’ve probably heard it on the news by now, but a tiger briefly got loose from its cage today in Hesperia:
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