Social Networking News, Tools of the Trade - by Patrick Thornton on Friday, April 11, 2008 11:57 - View Comments

Playing the News – A Means to Get Your Sources Engaged

I often point to ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and Mashable as
examples of beat blogging – and the latest experiment from RWW is a
perfect example why.

Using Impact Games they created four
characters
who could play out recent tech news. You could be a
developer, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc, and predict what they would do
next and how they would react to future circumstances.

From ReadWriteWeb:

"How
it works: in this particular game you can choose to play the role of
any of 4 different players: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, a Market
Analyst. Then you can either predict what will happen, or voice your opinion about what should
happen. Or both. If for example you choose to play as Google, you can
predict that Google will open up the languages beyond Python. If you
voice an opinion, you are guided by several "advisors" – in this case
we have RWW, CNET and Dave Winer.
The difference between predicting and voicing an opinion is that you
may not necessarily agree with what you predict Google will do, so you
can then cast your opinion about what you think Google ought to do!


This
is the first in a series of games that we’ll run over the next few
months on ReadWriteWeb. If you have ideas for other games, please let
us know in the comments below."

Now I know what you are thinking, "too techie." Again: Look past the tech subject matter – this is a method that can be used to cover ANY topic from the environment to your local city government. Turn the news into an educational game.

Imagine
a situation where these ‘news scenario games’ are as quick and easy to create as blog
posts. Why not build a special one for your sources? Get them to
comment on current events and feel like they are playing a game at the
same time.

So much of beat blogging is finding a way to engage
your sources – give them a reason to stay involved, perhaps creating
game-like sourcing is a means to do that.


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  • http://culturite.tumblr.com culturite

    ‘News scenario games’ are a great idea, David. I’d like to see what we could make happen on NowPublic.

  • Mary Specht

    Hard to get my head around the details of this geek-tastic Google story, but I’m excited to see a promising news game format.

    It would be neat to extend the role-playing some more: after you get a majority verdict on what one actor will do (say, Amazon), you could ask readers to come back and guess what the other actor (say, Google) would do in response to that. Keep it going a little bit.

    Thanks, David, for pointing this out!

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BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.