What Can Computer Games Teach Journalists?

Presentation by Glenn Thomas
Co-Founder, Smashing Ideas, Inc.
August 8, 2002
AEJMC Convention, Miami Beach , FL

Keynote Remarks by: Glenn Thomas Co-Founder, Smashing Ideas, Inc.

Thursday, August 8, 2002, 11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m. AEJMC Convention, Miami Beach, FL

Schaffer: Let me introduce our headline speaker today. Glenn Thomas is a co-founder, he’s a director of Smashing Ideas, Inc. It’s a Seattle company he formed in ‘96 to create interactive media for the Web, for TV, for electronic devices.

Most of the time he’s doing this for advertising or consumer brand companies, places like Kraft or Post Cereals, Nickelodeon, Ford. He did the Coca-Cola interactive Olympic torch relay map, a Madonna interactive music video.

We came across Glenn after one of our funded projects, done by the Herald in Everett, Washington, sought his help. He helped them create a clickable map to report on a waterfront redevelopment project that allowed readers, news consumers, to move icons around and vote with their mouse on their preferences.

Next, he created a growth and sprawl map for the Myrtle Beach Sun News.

Now mind you, Glenn is not a journalist. He doesn’t read newspapers. He doesn’t have time for TV. But he would self-describe himself as a voracious consumer of news, mostly online. And I think to me he represents two trends that we’ve seen in our work at the Pew Center.

One is sort of the well-documented capacity to access news and information anywhere, any time. I think the second is an emerging trend that we see for people to engage in the process not so much of consuming a final story as it is a process of building, co-authoring, co-producing their own story, their own internal narrative.

It’s a different exercise. They’re building and assembling these stories from components of news and information that they get a little on radio, they scan the newspaper headlines. They may have CNN on in the background. They e-mail people, they use the Web, they interact with information, they watch Jay Leno at night.

And through all of these components, they’re building what they feel, constructing what they feel to be the truth about their community, the truth about their world.

They can ask a question if they need to clarify information. They can go to other links of they need more elaboration. They can figure out places where they can do something about a problem if they want to.

I think, to me, this has very interesting potential for journalists. So the question that I suggest that rises out of this is, if people are composing their own stories from different component parts, should we, as journalism educators, be helping students deliver interesting and compelling components, rather than a well-crafted, finished product? Should the emphasis be on components and connections rather than craftsmanship?

So I’ll just let that question out there to linger in your brain.

For Glenn, I think one of these interesting components falls into the gaming arena, computer games. He is an expert on Flash. He has authored the book Flash Studio Secrets.

And today I really ask him to try to address another question for us, which is, namely, what can computer games teach journalists? So Glenn, have at it. Thank you. [Applause.]

Thomas: I speak quite frequently at technology conferences and I have to tell you that this is a slightly different conference. In technology conferences, in the elevators going up and down the hotel, people are trying to figure out where the wireless hot spots are. In this conference last night, as I was going up and down in the elevator after dinner, a woman came up to me and asked me a survey question: Had I had any problems with my room after checking in?

As Jan said, I’m not a journalist. I did not go to journalism school. I have never worked in a newsroom. I have no real connection with your industry, other than the fact that we’ve done this project and I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in some of the journalism education efforts through the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, as well as the API in Virginia, I guess.

I am, however, completely a consumer of news.

When Jan says I’m voracious, what she’s referring to is last night at dinner, when we were talking, and I said I don’t get a daily newspaper. On a daily or weekly basis I review The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, The Guardian in Britain, MSNBC, CNN. And that has to do with both my job and home, where I have broadband. I’m always on; I’m always connected.

So I do have, I think, strong opinions about the news. I have strong opinions about interactive, and I hope to share them with you today.

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