This was a collaborative project to explore virtual news venues as a viable space for the evolution of journalism. As part of this project, Dancing Ink Productions created a newsroom in the virtual world of Second Life for the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo.  The project was directed by veteran American journalist Lawrence Pintak now Dean of the Murrow College at Washington State University who covered the Middle East for 30 years. It was funded by a grant from USAID.  The first tenants of the virtual newsroom were a group of eight Egyptian bloggers. Dancing Ink Productions reported on their efforts covering the 2008 US Presidential Campaign at Dispatches from the Imagination Age.

The virtual newsroom hosted a series of events, including a press conference with former US-Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy James K. Glassman; and a conference about coverage of the Swine Flu crisis with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Documentary reports on those events are below. Broadcast quality machinima for all the events is produced in collaboration with Ill Clan Animation Studios.

Virtual Journalism: The CDC Discusses Swine Flu is a documentary about a May 16, 2009 event in the AUC Virtual Newsroom.

Documentary Premiere: The machinima documentary, “Virtual Journalism: Inside the American University in Cairo Virtual Newsroom,” exploring journalistic and cross-cultural impact and potential of the virtual newsroom project premiered on April 6, 2009 at the Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication conference on Virtual Journalism. That video, which was produced in collaboration with Ill Clan Animation Studios can be viewed below:

Inaugural Broadcast: On January 12, 2009 at 11 am EST, the Inaugural Broadcast of the American University in Cairo’s Virtual Newsroom (designed and produced by Dancing Ink Productions for The American University in Cairo with funding from USAID) took place in the virtual world of Second Life and was broadcast to a live global Internet audience produced in collaboration with Ill Clan Animation Studios. The live audience communicated in real-time chat with event participants and moderators in Second Life. The event was produced and hosted by Rita J. King, the CEO and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, and Joshua S. Fouts, the Chief Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Productions and broadcast to the Internet by SLCN (videos below). The broadcast-quality machinima documentary produced by Dancing Ink Productions co-directed with Ill Clan Animation Studios features a moderated discussion about the transfer of power between US president administrations between Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James K. Glassman (also a well-known journalist) and eight Egyptian political bloggers who covered the US election. The documentary depicts the event itself, as well as the reaction of Glassman, the bloggers and project director Lawrence Pintak, a veteran war correspondent and author who runs the American University in Cairo’s Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research. Read the press release from the American University of Cairo summarizing the event here.

Second Life avatar of then-US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman in the virtual newsroom of the American University in Cairo in Second Life.

Below are videos from the January 12 event:

Short Clip from the AUC Glassman Event

Full-length video of the 45 minute live event.

November 2008: Construction of the AUC Virtual Newsroom begins

Live from the AUC Virtual Newsroom: The CDC on Swine Flu." Broadcast quality video from the May 16, 2009 live event with the CDC in the AUC Virtual Newsroom produced in collaboration with Ill Clan Animation Studios.

On Thursday June 4, 2009 Lawrence Pintak (co-director of the AUC Virtual Newsroom project with Dancing Ink Productions) will appear on CNN to discuss President Barack Obama’s speech from Cairo, Egypt.

A Live Broadcast on Swine Flu from a World Where Germs Can’t Be Transmitted

On Saturday, May 16, 2009, the AUC Virtual Newsroom featured Glenn Nowak and Jay Bernhardt of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), members of Global Voices and journalists from 12 countries in a discussion about Swine Flu and the transformation of media. Walid Al-Saqaf, represented the journalists and bloggers. Al-Saqaf is the former editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times and currently the Founder and Administrator of YemenPortal.net. “There is something about Second Life that is good and that is that you can never get contaminated by any disease even though you meet millions of people,” said Al-Saqaf, to the audience in the virtual newsroom, in Cairo and on the web.

Lawrence Pintak, Director, Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at The American University in Cairo (and newly appointed Dean of the Murrow College at Washington State University) who hosted the event said, “This has been an adventure for all of us … One story that the whole world is dealing with these days is swine flu. Here in Cairo, the government has ordered that every single pig be killed. That’s something the WHO and other experts oppose. So we thought it appropriate to use this unique virtual bridge to allow our group here in Cairo – and bloggers participating in this event around the world – to learn a little more about how to get to the truth about the disease in order to better educate their audiences. For that, we have turned to the Centers for Disease Control.”

Overcoming Limitations on the Free Flow of Information

Rita J. King, CEO and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, moderated the panel: “Before the event, we met with many of the participants to discuss the free flow of information they wanted to achieve. The CDC is new to social media but is setting an example among government agencies. The journalists and bloggers are from 12 different countries. Some are dealing with various limitations in the struggle to deliver accurate, meaningful information to their respective audiences.”

King, who is also an investigative reporter, is the author of “Big Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast,” and co-author of the newly published book, “Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina.”

Joshua S. Fouts, Chief Global Strategist at Dancing Ink Productions offered, “This event once again demonstrated the power of digital culture and in this case digital diplomacy to create new opportunities for cultural dialog across time and space.”

A New Approach to Global Dialogue

While this was the first time the CDC has participated in a live broadcast from Second Life, the agency already had a headquarters set up within the virtual world when they were invited to participate in the broadcast from the AUC Virtual Newsroom.

The CDC has recently started to explore the use of social media and provide links and resources for an increasing number of followers. Currently, @cdcemergency has over 240,000 followers.

Many of the bloggers and journalists who had been new to Second Life for the Inuagural Broadcast from the AUC Virtual Newsroom arrived to the event customized, familiar with how to communicate and navigate within the space.

The broadcast was streamed live to the internet by TREET.TV (watch entire archive here), and anyone watching from around the world could watch the broadcast and communicate in live real time chat with event moderators and participants in Second Life.

Glenn Nowak, Director, Division of Media Relations, Office of Enterprise Communication Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Jay M. Bernhardt Director, National Center for Health Marketing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) both already had avatars.

Jay Bernhardt, who heads the social media operations told the audience, “I recommend people visit the CDC social media website On that site it lists a lot of different things people can get access to. Some are subscriber based like Twitter feeds for example and you can sign up for any or all of our Twitter feeds, which obviously can be mobile enabled.”

Glen Nowak offered these thoughts on the fact that people around the world rely on the CDC’s data, “What we’re trying to do with people living in developing countries when it comes to things like novel flu viruses or other health threats is we’re trying to raise awareness of what the health issues are. We’re trying to give people a perspective. We’re trying to give them the information we have about how much a threat this does pose.”

Screenshot of the CDC Event in the AUC Virtual Newsroom

Special thanks to Texas Timtam and Starr Sonic of Treet.TV for their quick turnaround in delivering the video from Saturday’s CDC conversation on coverage of the H1N1 (Swine Flu) virus. The video is about 60 minutes long. In coming days we will provide a shorter, YouTube-friendly report.

Two versions are available for viewing:

* high quality video for web & mobile devices;
* HD 720p for computer, large screen or home TV set-top box viewing

"Virtual Journalism" a new documentary by Dancing Ink Productions (click image to watch).

By Rita J. King

Today at the Virtual Journalism Conference at the Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University (WSU), Dancing Ink Productions (DIP) is proud to premiere our latest documentary: “Virtual Journalism: Inside the Virtual Newsroom of the American University in Cairo.” The documentary is part of an ongoing project in collaboration with Lawrence Pintak the director of the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism and Research to explore the transformation of the business and culture of journalism in a global context. It was produced in conjunction with Ill Clan Animation studios. It describes a news conference in Second Life organized by DIP and AUC which brought together James K. Glassman who was then US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and a group of eight Egyptian bloggers.

Inside the AUC Virtual Newsroom

The AUC Virtual Newsroom project idea was hatched by Pintak and DIP’s Joshua Fouts over tea in Amman, Jordan at an Aspen Institute Retreat on U.S.-Arab Media. Fouts and Pintak were interested in trying to explore how blogging and other evolving Internet-based technologies could be used to illustrate how journalism is changing and what role these technologies, especially virtual worlds, can play in empowering and training journalists worldwide. Second Life, in particular, had a robust user base with a diverse global population.

That retreat also produced an article DIP wrote for the Aspen Institute called, “Virtual Pilgrimage to Mecca: Building Dialogue with Avatars,” about an encounter DIP had at a virtual hajj to Mecca while conducting research for the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project.

The newsroom was designed in coordination with the bloggers and AUC.

This project, which was funded with support by USAID, was the second part of a larger project that brought the group of bloggers to the US throughout the fall of 2008 to cover the US presidential campaign season.

In the initial leg, the bloggers reported via their blog about their observations on the campaign. After the election, DIP built them a virtual newsroom. Shortly thereafter we hosted the first press conference in the newsroom. Coincidentally, while learning about Second Life, some of the bloggers were able to attend a rally on which DIP reported about the recent conflict in Gaza. Their first public news event was the press conference with James K. Glassman.

The Flickr Gettr is one of the tools in the AUC Virtual Newsroom. It enables visitors to search for Flickr tags. Images tagged with a match are projected into the virtual newsroom to demonstrate a snapshot of the collective global consciousness.

The documentary produced from that event and subsequent interviews examines how journalism is changing and what potential opportunities for journalism came out of that experience. As Pintak offers at the end of the video, “Journalism adapts to its environment.”

DIP has a longstanding interest in understanding the upheaval in the journalism industry. The company was founded in 2006 when I had a realization that the industry had changed in ways that required me to approach it in a radically different way in order to continue delivering investigative reports on complicated issues.

My past work includes long-term investigations of the energy and nuclear industry, the relationship between corporations and regulatory agencies, potential voting fraud on Diebold machines, studies on the history of the civil rights movement, the evolution of multinational corporations and the economic effects of such develpment and extensive reportage on post-Katrina corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast, which yielded “Big, Easy Money: Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast” and the recently published book that I co-authored, “Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina.” It is my belief that corporate culture must evolve in order to serve the greater public good and make a profit as awareness of complex social issues continues to grow within the digital culture. We work with a growing number of Fortune 500 clients, think-tanks, global governments and institutions that are looking to amplify their efforts to achieve this goal.

DIP’s Joshua Fouts first began chronicling this transformation as editor of OJR the Online Journalism Review — the first Internet-based journalism review — which he co-founded in 1998. We’ve both been watching and participating in this evolution since the late 1990′s. My 2001 Village Voice cover story, “Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from an AOL Censor,” contributed to a new conversation around identity and the consequences of anonymity in online communities. Our primary mission is to enhance knowledge of physical world systems that affect millions of lives through sophisticated, creative use of Internet technologies.

The AUC Virtual Newsroom includes multiple zones which show both ancient and modern Egypt.

We have watched with interest the important work of industry leaders; Dan Gillmor, whose guidance led to the Pulitzers finally accepting digital journalism;Clay Shirky, who is a concise, visionary leader on the subject, and Jay Rosen, who recently was tapped by the Huffington Post to head up their investigative journalism fund. I started blogging for the Huffington Post the week I found out about Second Life, back in 2006, and I’m amazed at how far the field has advanced since those early days. Now I’m writing case studies for Linden Lab to document the business enterprise use of Second Life, and we can’t write them fast enough.

Media coverage of Second Life has consistently missed the mark on the business value of the platform, mistaking the visibility of random Pamela Anderson doppelgangers for the population of a world that continues to dazzle through the resourcefulness and creativity of its population, which today includes the illustrious Bob Schieffer and Helen Thomas, both of whom are participating in the WSU Virtual Journalism Summit today from the physical and virtual world. Keynote will be delivered by Erica Driver of ThinkBalm (the company published a special report for the event that includes our work).

It is our hope that the AUC Virtual Newsroom project and documentary will move thinking forward toward a more nuanced understanding of the utility and value of virtual worlds for journalism.

A scene from the AUC Newsroom space.

The Egyptian bloggers meet to discuss the press conference.

DIP assesses the value of potential experimental models for funding and delivering world-class journalism and works with clients to create new models for both. If you’re interested more, please contact us. We also conduct media strategy for projects that work toward a new global culture and economy. DIP is frequently featured globally. Click here for a sample of recent press.