Digital Edge: Road-Test a Virtual Newsroom

By Beth Lawton

First Published: May 2008

A recent conference about the best ways to design an entirely new physical newsroom caused me to think about the physical spaces involved in my typical workday. From trying to park my car in the same space every day to putting my coffee cup in the same area of my desk, I’m a creature of habit.

But if my boss turned my desk around or moved the coffee pot closer to people with whom I don’t normally work, would my productivity increase? Would I come up with new ideas? It turns out the answer is—maybe.

Journalists and architects (yes, architects) gathered in Durham, N.C., in April to discuss physical newsroom space and whether playing with that space can positively affect newsroom operations from convergence to collaboration.

The conference was part of the Next Newsroom Project (www.nextnewsroom.com), which is researching the best way to design an entirely new physical newsroom for The Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke University in Durham, to encourage experimentation, teamwork and flexibility. Chris O’Brien, a Chronicle alum and business reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, is the project’s manager (see story, p. 24). Last year, the project received a one-year Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (www.knightfoundation.org).

Although the project is very physically oriented, one small part is entirely virtual. Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation journalism program officer and News Challenge coordinator, asked O’Brien to create a version of the Next Newsroom in the virtual world of Second Life so participants could experiment with space and road test the architecture before committing to a design.

Second Life (www.secondlife.com), which debuted in 2003, allows people to create avatars and “live” in the virtual world, doing many things, including eating, sleeping, working and playing. Some people choose to have their avatar reflect their real world existence, while others create a true alter ego to do things virtually that they could never do in their real lives. The world even has its own currency, Linden dollars, loosely tied to the U.S. dollar.

Everything in Second Life starts as a yellow 3-D square—people, trees, buildings. Second Life members can pull at the corners to transform the shape and use an options menu to change the color and functionality, or import images. The Next Newsroom in Second Life has grown from a single square to include bulletin boards that allow idea sharing among Second Life residents, a conference area with an interactive white board, a video viewing room with multiple screens and an auditorium, which Second Life residents can “float” up to, since it would be the newsroom’s roof. Multimedia elements include an RSS feed of student newspaper headlines and screens for streaming audio and video.

For the Next Newsroom project, however, Second Life is more than a virtual play space. It’s the next generation of 3-D architectural modeling. Once an architect draws up plans, reporters and editors will be able to walk virtually through the space, testing whether things are conveniently placed and how they will interact with coworkers, Kebbel says.

One architect I met at the conference advocated a low-risk method of instituting a physical change that incorporates flexibility. This is about as low-risk as it gets: Newspapers wanting to experiment with space in a virtual world can sign up for a free Second Life account at www.secondlife.com. For the Next Newsroom team, using virtual worlds will be an informative way to experiment with space—even if they don’t really plan to put an auditorium on the roof.