Review - Second Life Herald

The Second Life Herald (www.secondlifeherald.com) is the first virtual tabloid newspaper, or at least it claims to be. As an online publication it likes to claim many virtual firsts and some of them I'm sure are actually the case. At any rate, it is a source for news and trends in virtual culture, and also includes plenty of images offering examples of how the virtual community is modeling and representing themselves these days.

As a brief background, the SL Herald began reporting in The Sims Online as the alphaville herald. After thousands migrated to SL because of the lack of user created content in TSO the herald migrated along with them. Not to mention the fact that the head writer Urizenus Sklar got permanently banned from TSO servers for writing too many muck-raking stories that held Electronic Arts in a very critical eye. Its a long amusing story that they published as a book with the same title as the newspaper. Now in SL the writers roam around the different sims writing stories that give Linden Labs much of the same treatment that they used to give to Electronic Arts.

I find it to be a good sampling of trends in the virtual community if you're interested where that culture is going. It's especially useful if you're interested but find participating in SL yourself sometimes exhausting and time consuming. It does however have some flaws. They occasionally have a post where they feature an avatar is sexy spread similar to pin-ups in British tabloid magazines which I find doesn't contribute to their goal of creating serious discourse around virtual culture. Its also strange to have an "underground" journalistic voice without an established authoritarian journalistic voice to react against as you might in conventional press. As far as I know there isn't a virtual equivalent of USA Today, but the Herald here functions as a kind of virtual Chicago Reader. I have heard that Harper's has a base in SL but I didn't get the impression that is was that comprehensive, but more like a novelty for the real world. If there are any other SL publications out there that I'm not aware of please let me know.