"…its man on the street type stuff for me. I’m there as a journalist and
by bringing people into the Second Life Reuters headquarters I’m not
just talking to the bank owners and the people who have tons of money
to build corporate headquarters, I’m talking to the regular users and
they are important sources."

Eric Krangel is known as EricReuters on Second Life, which has been his beat for Reuters over the last year.  For those in the know, Second Life is a virtual world – where people live out entire lives, spend real money, conduct real protests and converse with friends. I contacted Eric, who is also a friend and colleague, to find out how reporting in Second Life might be similar to using a social network. How is reporting in a virtual world different from using Facebook or MySpace, which most reporters are becoming familiar with and what he has learned in his experience as one of the only professional reporters working in an intensely technologically based beat (both in what he is reporting and how he reports it).

This is part of our series on Lessons From Reporters – where we are trying to tap into the experience of reporters who are on the cutting edge of beat blogging.

So tell me about Second Life. In some ways, I feel like it’s a social network on steroids. Am I completely wrong in characterizing it like that?

I actually have a funny anecdote about that. I was at a panel this last week in Washington D.C. it was a policy conference for the internet caucas and they had a panel on issues related to virtual worlds. About an hour before the panel the four of us on it, me, someone from Linden Labs (who owns Second Life) and a lawyer from the American Bar Association who looks into the legal issues of Second Life got together. The moderator, a long time tech journalist from CBS opened up the conversation: "So what is a virtual world." We all looked at each other as if to say – I don’t want to answer that, why don’t you give it a shot.

It’s still so new that nobody was ready to do it. With all social networks, which have been around for a bit, people generally have an understanding of what they entail – they include Orkut, LiveJournal, Facebook Hi5 and others.

I wouldn’t call Second Life a social network, but it incorporates the aspects of them. But there are certain elements that I think should define it that are different from social networks. There needs to be a sense of geographic context. Whether it’s 2.5d – it needs to be there. Also in Second Life the users don’t always use it to represent themselves, but to create a fantasy personality.

It’s a social network in that everyone has their own space for personal expression. You friend people and you have an aggregate way to watch your friends and you can contact them all easily. There is also some capability to contact them publicly or privately. In Second Life people build homes and have friends and with its own internal messaging system you can initiative voice conversations with them using a headphone and a mic.  You can also invite people to teleport to where you are, so you can visit people.

Tell me more about that: When you are in Second Life how do you get in contact with people?

If somebody is talking to me and says there is news over here they
will offer me a teleport button and I can click okay — and I vanish
from where I am and end up there. Then the reporting really begins.

You can accept friendships and by having friends in a virtual world
you can keep contact with them and trade inventory or see when they are
online. You can even see who is online at SL even when you are not on
through a Facebook application.

I actually don’t use that. Who I have friended is part of my
journalistic work product and Facebook I keep for my friends. But there
is another application I use that checks my friend on SL and lets me
know on my Mac – so I can keep on track of who from SL is online.

You were talking about reporting in Second Life and repeorting ON Second Life. Can you tell me more about that?

I’m a Second Life reporter and also a reporter for Reuters:  I write
about business and technology — so if in Second Life there are a group
of Werewolves and Vampires that are going to have a war in the areas
where you can be killed (but killed in SL doesn’t have real
consequences) – I won’t cover that and never have.

But, there are SL banks and stock markets — and one company will try
to take over a second one — or another will have an IPO release. My
coverage has not really been about what Second Life stock is doing well
– or who is competing with another, but about the fact that this is
all happening. I try to see the forest from the trees. So I write about
what it menas that there is a Second Life stock exchange. Is it safe?
Is this a place where you can or should put real money? How does it
work? What safe guards are there? That’s more the type of journalism I
am doing.

There
are a lot of Second Life blogs, one of the special challenges I get is
that — Second-Lifers are all on the Internet. The are all reading
blogs and are acutely self-aware about how they are being portrayed and
that where they are hanging out is being written about in the media. I
have all kinds of instances of getting hyperbolic responses in blogs
about what I’ve written. I get a lot of feedback from my readers –
which is great.

But I have to put it in context that everything is part of a virtual world — and it hasn’t been around as long as Wall Street.

Obviously I get a lot of Second Life residence reading my stories, but I don’t see secondlife.rueters.com
as a news service oriented primarly towards people in Second Life. It’s
more about what Second Life is and what it represents and where the
virtual world industry — is likely to go.

Okay, with that distinction in mind: How does one report on Second Life? What’s your day-to-day like?

The first thing I do any day is probably similar to any other beat.
I have any number of blogs or news feeds that I read. There are tons of
Second Life blogs. Some are very silly, some are very heavy about the
Second Life fashion industry and what designers are hot. Others help
bring me up to speed on what is going on.

I watch Linden Labs, they have an official blog and lots of news breaks from there.

That’s the ground level – it puts my foot in the door and gives me a superficial understanding of whats going on.

Beyond that, it’s real journalism. It’s virtual shoe leather. I’m listening to Twitter. I have office hours
every week. One hour every week I’m in the Reuters SL office and
anybody can come and tell me what they think or what a great story that
I’m missing. Or what we should be covering. That try to make myself
accesible through SL and email as much as possible.

Believe it or not, the best reporting comes just from listening to
what people are talking about – and the comments on blogs. It’s just
virtual shoe leather in the SL community.

Like any other beat, it’s a question of being there. If I’m hanging
out on a random Wednesday night I might log into SL and check to see
who is on and  check in with people to see what’s going on. Strike up
conversations and maybe teleport people over to Reuters or I might
teleport to other places in Second Life.

It’s this crazy metaphor, but once you get past that its like any
other beat. As a fellow professional journalist if you were assigned
the Second Life beat – you would approach it the same way if you were
given the Rome beat for a global wire, you start off the same way: read
the guide books, walk around and talk to people.

In Rome you gotta get in your car and go. In SL its new technology, sometimes the teleports don’t work or the service is down.

Are there any lessons you’ve learned while reporting on SL that you think could help in traditional reporting?

It’s hard to find Second Life specific things, while it is a crazy
metaphor you are exploring from your computer: the lessons are the same
- Be out there and meet people. You just need to know how to do that
online.

In terms of using social networks, everyone on SL is also on
Twitter, Facebook and all these other places. That is useful for any
journalists and it’s particularly applicable to me in SL. The internet
and social networks are an indispensable resource for any beat. There
are blogs about anything, whether it’s education or energy or a
geographic local. Log on and identify and start reading the blogs and
read the comments and contribute and start building sources and
contacts and be recognized as a writer and participant yourself.

Tell me a little more about virtual shoe-leather. How do you
think it could be used to create networks that reporters use to stay
informed?

Everything is moving in that direction. While virtual shoe-leather
is easy to apply in SL you can use it a little in any beat, because so
much discussion, ideas and debates are going on online.

I like Ning, but I think it’s a fine line for a journalist to walk.
You want to be there and want to participate and generate ideas so you
can learn, but you want to avoid the ‘dance for me monkeys dance ‘
attitude towards your sources. Perhaps there are always some people
that you have to cajole to get them to talk and some people who enjoy
the press and want to give you information and enjoy that — I
wouldn’t want to invite people that are my sources and just pose random
questions – I tend to take a passive approach ..rather than actively
say: "I’m a journalism, I’m building a Ning site and I will pick and
choose the best questions." I like the passive approach more, where you
try to find people and blogs operating in their natural habitat. It’s a
little more work, its a more deliberative process, but you get a more
organic result.

Well, tell me more about the "office hours" you have. Have you gotten any good stories from it?

A few, honestly not a whole lot. Part of the issue was that I didn’t
start them until I was established in SL and now I have my ring of
sources.  I do like feeling like I’m part of this community and that I
am accesible to people and they can give me feedback –  that is
important.

One thing I like most about my office hours is that its a great
reality check for me. Because if you are writing about Wall Street or
the police beat – its established journalism, but Second Life is so
new. At office hours I find out from people that the stories I write
are important. More important than that, I am talking to real people -
it’s not coming from the real life company behind the Second Life
banks.

People ask me whatever they want and I might tell them that I’m
writing a story on bank — and I can ask them what they think about
them: its man on the street type stuff for me. I’m there as a
journalist and by bringing people into the Second Life Reuters
headquarters I’m not just talking to the bank owners and the people who
have tons of money to build corporate headquarters, I’m talking to the
regular users and they are important sources.

So my office hours is a give and take.  They ask me about stories I
wrote and I get to hear from regular people that I might not hear from
– I get to talk to people who aren’t trying to spin a story, which is
invaluable.