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.
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.
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).
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 about the Metaverse feature photos of gawk-mouthed people in VR headsets. In the original depiction of the Metaverse, only the elite use standalone VR to access it, while the vast majority of people who use metaverse platforms in the real world do not access them through HMDs. Worst of all journalistically: Illustrating a metaverse story with headsets implicitly promotes Meta's VR-centric strategy at the expense of its many competitors who do not.