What do Ségolène Royal and Hillary Clinton have in common? They both used Second Life as a promotion tool and as always journalists go where the news is, even when they have to take a journey into the virtual world.

The 20th January 2006 French newspaper Libération opened with pictures of the French presidential candidates in Second Life.  On the first page a girl – an avatar of Second Life – with a dressed in red and the symbol of the socialist party behind her, the virtual look-a-like of Ségolène Royal who went up against Nicolas Sarkozy in the elections of June 2007. The photo was taken by Marco ‘Manray’ Cadioli, special correspondent for Liberation in Second Life, the internet virtual world launched in 2003 by Linden Lab.

Manray, also known as Marco Cadioli, started a photo journalistic project called “Internet Landscape” in 2003. He considers the net as an extra reality, an extra place in the world to capture. As such he takes pictures of things he stumbles across on the net. Cadioli: “I travel across the net like a Japanese tourist in Europe. I jump from a place to another. I travel across the net like I were a reporter to tell about place made by data. I take shots of the net.” In the beginning he started taking snapshots of web pages. Then, he was an embedded photo reporter in some on line 3D war mass games, such as Quake III.  Finally he was hired by newspapers and magazines after he spent a couple of years as freelance photographer in Second Life.

Virtual gossip

As Second Life was booming, leading news agency Reuters decided to open its headquarters in Second Life in October 2006. As a result the attention of the mainstream media grew, as well as the number of the residents. There example was quickly followed by others such as CNN, Sky News, Wired Magazine, Sluub webtelevision and Slart Magazine. But what is even more exciting is that a whole new reporting genre was created: news produced in Second Life providing residents-only information.

For instance, gossip magazine The AvaStar is a professional tabloid newspaper on entertainment, style and advice. Here you can find hot items like ‘Are furries dying out?’ on the abuse animal shaped residents suffer. The AvaStar is a product of Bild Online and counts around twenty embedded reporters. By the way they are always looking for new contributors. Even Italy now has its own web reporting newspaper: 2L Second Life Magazine. Also take some time to read the webpage of net reporter Wagner James, who was an embedded journalist for the Linden Lab until 2006. It seems that SL has slowed down recently but experts are convinced that virtual worlds will be more and more merged with the daily life in the next years. Could net reporting be a new way to step into journalism?