Foxman, Maxwell2022-12-022022-12-022022-10-06Foxman, M. (2022). Lessons for Journalists from Virtual Worlds. Columbia Journalism Review.https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/lessons-for-journalists-from-virtual-worlds.phphttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/2788157 pagesIn the darkest days of the covid-19 pandemic, as many people figured out how to work and live in isolation, they turned to various virtual worlds and spaces for comfort. From games like Animal Crossing to Zoom, the popularity of communing and communicating both virtually and synchronously skyrocketed and persists in “post pandemic” life. Everything from conferences to the rising concept of the “metaverse” connects to virtual worlds. At the same time, the pandemic was merely tinder for a fire that has been flickering in digital gaming for decades. Almost twenty years earlier, news outlets like CNN and Reuters set up bureaus in Second Life and experimented with virtual-reality (VR) content. While concepts like the metaverse are positioned as future technology, virtual worlds are already widely available. Given this reality, how should journalists write about them, or even use them, in the present? This report takes a first step in answering this question. After providing a brief history, it defines virtual worlds as online and digital spaces of implied vast size in which users congregate, mostly synchronously. Approximations of virtual worlds can be found in online gaming, VR, and livestreaming platforms like Twitch, all of which cater to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, if not more, at any given time. Using the pandemic as the launching point for research, the report then analyzes 379 articles that reflect journalists’ current and shifting views about virtual worlds. Animal Crossing, Twitch, and VR technology represent three archetypal cases. An inductive analysis of key themes is followed by semistructured interviews with twenty-one journalists who wrote about the subject. These interviews support specific lessons writers can take in how to approach virtual worlds from a journalistic viewpoint, as well as the opportunities and drawbacks of using them as tools.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USArticle