Making a Metaverse That Matters

Appendix B: Advice for Metaverse Reporters

I dearly hope the major news outlets assign beat reporters to the leading metaverse platforms, a need that's long overdue. At the risk of advising the competition, here are some of the practices and guidelines I've developed over 20 years on the Metaverse beat.

Fiercely Ferret Out and Report Unique, Engaged User Numbers and Concurrency Rates

It's easy to be swept up in a startup's grand vision, but a metaverse platform stands or falls on a growing, engaged community. (“Yes, this may be interesting,” as my then-editor Om Malik once told me, “but where's the fucking user growth?”) The hype wave over crypto and NFTs and the disastrous crash that followed would not have happened, had enough journalists maintained their focus on user metrics.

Leading Metaverse Community Creators Are as Important as Company Executives

Their stories are not only more interesting and inspiring, their insights into the platform that helps provide for their livelihood tend to be more brutally honest.

Related to that: Also join the metaverse platform you're reporting on it as a user, not necessarily to do embedded reporting (though that's highly recommended) but to get a firsthand view of how it works (or as is often the case, doesn't).

Please Stop Putting Photos of People in VR in Your Articles about the Metaverse

This one is more a note for your outlet's editor, but it definitely reflects poorly on you. Roughly 80 percent of features in mainstream media ...