In this era of newsroom downsizing and newspaper sell-offs, it’s refreshing, if not slightly perplexing, to hear this week’s news that Reuters is expanding, opening a news bureau in the virtual world of Second Life.

Reuters, my former employer, has at least one reporter in every conceivable corner of the globe. There are 190 Reuters bureaux in 128 countries, reporting on everything from wheat price fluctuations to Taliban insurgencies. It is serious stuff, the kind of news that keeps economies humming along and governments and people informed.

In 1865, it was Reuters that first told Europe that President Lincoln had been assassinated, a scoop that established the 155-year-old news agency as one of the world's finest. In December 2003, Reuters was the first international media organisation to report the capture of Saddam Hussein. In between, it struggled with sagging demand for its news terminals and conducted a few rounds of downsizing of its own.

But, it's expanding again. Well, virtually.

Reuters 191st bureau, it's safe to say, will have no Lincoln-sized scoops. Second Life is a world where the inhabitants levitate and vanish in a puff of pixels. Despots and assassins might take up Second Life one day, but their online personas would no doubt stand little chance against, say, that of a cut-throat 14-year-old from Bristol.

As beats go, Second Life has all the makings of a community on the rise, and thus a worthy territory for a news operation to keep tabs on. The number of new Second Lifers is growing at a rate of 20 per cent per month as the overall population nears one million. Its economy is on an annual run-rate set to exceed $130 million, growing as fast as the population.

The Second Life economy seems to run primarily on land speculation and servicing fellow avatars with essentials like virtual insurance and funky pixelised fashions. It's not unlike my neighbourhood in Rome, except maybe for the existence of a "pet manufacturer" and a bank that promises account holders a 44 per cent annual interest rate.

To be sure, Second Life is a game. But the game has real-world implications. It has become a model for studying human interaction, a lab for economists, social scientists and psychologists, not to mention companies and politicians looking to canvass public opinion.

Oddly, covering the interaction of avatars may teach newsrooms something new (or something they've forgotten) about human interaction. Trust me, staring at a screen of blinking share prices half the day can be a dehumanising experience for any journalist. Think The Matrix. Can a Q&A with a virtual CEO be any less meaningful?

In becoming the first professional news operation to assign a reporter full-time – in this case, Adam Pasick, one of Reuters' best and brightest – to cover a world populated by avatars, Reuters is once again on new ground, lonely ground even. Its Second Life bureau chief, known in-game as Adam Reuters, is unfazed. "There are a lot of possibilities," he tells me. "Everything that goes on in real life is happening in Second Life, happening and more."

A year ago, rival news operations might have responded to news of Reuters' virtual expansion with a "good luck, sucker" grin. This week, outside the rightwing blogosphere anyhow, the coverage has been played straight, even slightly encouraging. The truth is that news operations are baffled by Second Life – not the gangster-wannabe avatars that populate this world, but the swelling number of teens and twenty-somethings that prefer a pixelated planet to the actual one. Without a doubt, many media execs are hoping Reuters' expansion is a permanent one.

These are odd times in the news business. Google and Yahoo!, staffed primarily by spiders, software programmers and, oh, a few journalists, are the ascendant forces in the global news business, terrain Reuters once had a lock on. Meanwhile, the media operations that employ journalists are struggling to cover a world of actual banks, actual entrepreneurs and actual people as their reader base bides its time elsewhere. In a generation's time this journalist-reader gulf will only worsen – unless, that is, newsrooms prove as adaptable and imaginative as their readers.

Is it an oddball move to ask one of your correspondents to follow-up leads in a pixelised world? Hell, yes. But ignoring it would be weirder still.

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

Previous articles by Bernhard Warner can be found here

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